Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterfirefly | Hacker News Reader

It is perfectly grammatical if "brick" is taken to be a verb.

Edit: this is in reference to "brick the barn". Grammatical if nonsensical. "Brick ancient barn" is of course weird and wrong unless you really want to emphasize that this is a brick ancient barn and not a wooden ancient barn like all the other ancient barns. The normal adjective order can be deviated from for emphasis. My point was that that didn't work when "the" was one of the "adjectives".

(I've been trying to fall asleep for hours so I make mistakes left and right -- I apologize for not being clear about the word list I referred to.)

View on HN

Not to keep you up, but what's even cooler is that the degree to which you can deviate depends on the adjective's class, too. While I can sorta see "brick ancient barn" working, albeit with such heavy emphasis on "brick" that "ancient barn" turns into a bit of a compound, "grain lone silo" or "fish dry pond" don't sound grammatical to me at all. Maybe also because "grain silo" and "fish pond" are almost-notquite compounds?

That ship has sailed. It's 06:40 and the sun has been pouring through my windows for more than an hour :/ The part of my body that has synched up with the daylight refuses to listen to the part that needs sleep.

"Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dream of inserting pretentious spaces between the constituent parts.

I actually thought of "stone chimney" as a compound noun instead of adjective + noun when I wrote it, precisely because I wanted to mock that and really hammer home the point. Unfortunately, the two look the same in English (but not in Danish) -- and I was tired -- so I didn't catch it and replace it with a better example.

English draws this distinction for gold, with gold (n) and golden (adj).

I actually meant: written in one word (stonechimney, a compound noun) or not (stone chimney, not a compound noun).

> "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns.

Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there.

Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com