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Comment by interestica | Hacker News Reader

Wait wait, Will European Life be the preferred term?

Should be “Europan” since “European” modifies “Europe” not “Europa”

Well, in some languages "Europa" is how it's called.

Well, in some languages "kernel", "nucleus", and "cannon ball" is the same word. Just imagine hilarity talking about military and software.

Some people are just gluttons for pun-ishment.

If "Europa" is modified with an 'n' to form the demonym "Europan", is the star Vega properly modified the same way with an appended 'n' to form the demonym "Vegan"?

Yes and it has appeared that way in sci fi.

For more confusion, let’s call some star “Vegetary”.

Oh! Now I want to try some Vegan meat!

Not to be confused with vegan meat, much less Vegan vegan meat!

I can't articulate why but I feel like "vegan Vegan meat" is more grammatically correct than "Vegan vegan meat."

Your intuitions are correct. We follow modifier ordering in English. Most aren’t aware of it.

You can start here: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-gram...

It's amazing: I only learned about that when I when I was middle-aged, reading some internet article. But as a native English speaker, I subconsciously already knew this rule, somehow, like it's hard-wired somehow. They never taught this to us in school.

They don’t need to teach you this. I don’t see why that’s an oversight. There’s much to being fluent in a language like this that we take for granted.

That's what I mean: you just learn it by being immersed in the language and hearing it every day and only knowing that language, so you learn to use it the way everyone around you uses it. So there's actual rules to the language that, as a native speaker, you're not even aware are rules. It probably took some ESL person to notice this rule even existed, and to figure out how it actually worked and write it down.

Reading this link, I'm wondering if my initial formulation wasn't correct after all? It depends on how you categorize "vegan" but in the link they state that "material" is the only group of adjectives that comes after "nationality", and of the categories listed, I'd say vegan fits the "material" category best?

Or am I misinterpreting something?

English is my second language, but I do want to speak it as well as possible, hence my efforts to understand this topic. I do apologise for pestering you all with these questions tho.

You're probably right! I sometimes unconsciously apply Swedish grammar to the English language. Thanks for pointing it out to me, TIL!

Yeah. But same spelling, different sound when spoken.

Like Dominican/Dominican. (The Dominican Republic and Dominica share the same demonym when written, but it tends to have a different prononciation).

You might be grammatically correct but it is much more confusing and funny to speculate about the possibility of European life.

European life: "am I a joke to you?"

I mean... Barring some pretty big catastrophes occurring, Europa is likely to outlast Europe by several orders of magnitude. If the moon is happy to wait, they'll inherit the name regardless.

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