Language desk
< August 16	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	August 18 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 17

English adjectives

Which is the reason for that English adjectives do not get plural -s when appearing before plural nouns? For example, why does English say yellow cars instead of yellows cars? All other Germanic languages, and also all other languages in Europe (except Hungarian and Turkic languages) say literally "yellows cars", so why English does not say? 40bus (talk) 12:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English adjectives have never had a plural -s, though. In Middle English they had a plural -e ending, which was fossilized in writing for a while after it had mostly disappeared in spoken language, but later disappeared altogether.
See Old English grammar#Adjectives and Middle_English#Adjectives 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:56, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Why did it disappear? 40bus (talk) 13:13, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As part of a general trend towards reducing unstressed final syllables (stress was usually at or near the beginning of the word). First, a lot of vowels merged together as schwa, then in the word-final sequence schwa + "n" the "n" was often dropped, and then around Chaucer's time, the word-final schwa (which was all that was left of many inflections) started disappearing... AnonMoos (talk) 22:37, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English, in general, has either lost (or never had) many of the clitics and other grammatical markers for Agreement. Compared with many other European languages, English words almost never change to agree with the other words in a sentence; there are a few such agreements, such as some subject-verb agreement, but no where near as varied or complex as other language. English words really just keep the same form, except for the specific word being changed; it has very little redundancy such as one expects in other languages. This process of modifying words to fit their use is called inflection, and English used to be far more inflected, but it is not anymore. As for "why" it disappeared, there are lots of hypotheses, and little ways to verify those hypothesis. Lots of linguistic change is due to unknowable factors, called Drift. In this case, we are talking about a syntactic change to English. It's important to remember that linguistics is not physics; you can't prescribe deterministic "cause and effect" chains to explain why linguistic change happens. You can put events in chronological order, but you can't predictively say things will or will not happen. --Jayron 32 13:18, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One reason that has been suggested for English (a West Germanic language) losing most of its grammatical markers is that in the post-Roman period Britain was invaded and colonised by various North and West Germanic language speakers, including Norse, Jutes, Saxons, Frisians and Franks (in some periods collectively lumped together as "Danes"), who eventually blended to produce the English.

Because these people's languages were related, they could understand each other to a degree: much of their core vocabulary was similar, but their grammars differed more (because that's what happens when one language evolves into two or several). They may also often have been bilingual in their own tongue and Frisian – to which modern English most closely resembles – because the coastal Frisians may have been prominent in trading so that their language had become a lingua franca in North West Europe.

In these circumstances, when speaking together, these new neighbors would likely have dropped some of the grammatical inflections and other features peculiar to their own languages, resulting in a blend (arguably a creole) that lacked them. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.2390.195} 90.209.121.96 (talk) 14:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The grammar of Old English still had all the complex aspects (agreement, cases, genders, strong and weak declension, varying word order) found in most Germanic languages. When Middle English emerges after the Norman conquest, it is markedly different. Almost all of this complexity has disappeared. Unfortunately, documents from the transition period are written in Anglo-Norman French, so the transition process is not documented. The striking simplification has been compared to that seen in emerging creole languages, and people have even wondered if English as she is spoke should herself be classified as a creole, the so-called Middle English creole hypothesis. Even if many linguists feel that the label does not apply (see e.g. this readable article), similar forces leading to dramatic simplification have likely been in play. --Lambiam 14:48, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam, a problem I see with the MECH's implied late creolisation is that our knowledge of Old English is, necessarily, largely based on a small written corpus (represented by later MS copies of copies of . . .), much of which is poetry. Consider:

Poetry, whether orally transmitted or (later) written down, has meter and rhyme that in part depends on its words' grammatical inflections. For the poetry of an established piece to continue to "work", these are likely to be retained in their older form in that piece while the spoken vernacular tongue is moving on. Moreover, there is a tendency (obvious in, for example, Victorian poetry) for poets to deliberately use archaic, or pseudo-archaic, language for aesthetic effect.
There is a widespread (in time and space) tendency for non-poetic writers (and speakers in formal settings) to write (or speak) in older, more formal versions of their language than the current vernacular speech. Cicero and Caesar did not write in the same Latin vernacular that they likely used when shopping in the market; Francis of Asissi bucked the norm when he composed Laudes creaturarum in early Umbrian Italian while his peers were still using close-to-Classical Latin.
In the Old and Middle English context when literacy was rare, most writers operated either in the milieu of royal courts, which may well have favoured "old-fashioned virtues" in speech, and/or in monasteries, which by their nature were likely conservative in attitude. Writings from the period, therefore, are inherently likely to retain older characteristics in comparison to the evolving vernaculars of their times.

For these reasons I think it likely that the simplifying blendings (or creolisation) of the various Germanic languages (which would have differed from region to region as the different immigrant populations were not evenly spread) proceeded significantly earlier than the Anglo-Norman era. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.209.121.96 (talk) 14:48, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And why did English lost the infinitive ending -en, which is still present in German and Dutch? --40bus (talk) 14:57, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It still hasn't completely lost it: ox - oxen, child(er) (see Childermass) - children, man - men, shoe - shoon (used by Tolkien). When languages simplify, minority irregularities tend to be replaced by the more common regular usages, in this case -s or -es. Irregulars of more commonly used words tend to persist longest. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.209.121.96 (talk) 15:09, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I meant verb infinitive ending -en, not the noun plural -en. --40bus (talk) 15:13, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake, sorry. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.209.121.96 (talk) 13:58, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly because the Norman French language didn't have it, and as English changed over the centuries tended to minimize complex inflections and simplify rules of agreement as very different languages were married into one making Modern English. Or maybe not. As I noted above, linguistics is not physics, and there's no way to predict that "if X and Y conditions are met, then a language using "-en" for infinitives will drop that ending". That's not how this works. Linguistic change is mostly arbitrary and random; there may be antecedent events that occured before certain changes, but as Post hoc ergo propter hoc is an invalid conclusion; correlation does not imply causation, and without the ability to "run the experiment" multiple times, there is no "why". There is only "what happened before". What happened leading up to these changes from Old Anglo-Saxon to modern English was centuries of slow change as Norman French and Anglo-Saxon intermingled and morphed and changed into the language we call English today. You seem to expect some kind of direct, irrefutable, and simple causal relationship, like "If I push this ball with X force, it will experience Y acceleration", but language change doesn't happen in those ways. It's mostly random, and the best we can do is place those changes in historical context to understand what was happening when the language was changing. --Jayron 32 15:17, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

English might be rare in that the adjective and infinitive endings have been dropped in both spoken and written forms, but I think it's fairly common in other languages with similar grammatical endings retained in written form, but not in the spoken vernacular, with French -s for nouns and adjectives, a case in point. I also think that in some Spanish varieties, in the sentence "la estrella amarilla" and "las estrellas amarillas" (the yellow star(s)), the final -s is basically dropped in common speech, although it might just be a subtle distinction I'm not really attuned to. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:24, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If languages worked on the basis of having exactly the same features as other languages, there would eventually be no differences between them at all, and we'd have one world language. Time to rebuild the Tower of Babel, methinks. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That every other European language (except 2) or every other Germanic language says "yellows cars" isn't exactly true. In Germanic languages, attributively used adjectives can be declined for 4 cases, 2 numbers, 3 genders and 2 definitenesses. There's no gender distinction in the plural, which makes the plural effectively a fourth gender. The adjective doesn't have 32 different forms. In German, for many combinations of case, gender and definiteness, the singular adjective is the same as the plural. In modern Dutch, the adjective only has two forms (there are still separate and quite mandatory forms for the genitive and dative cases, but those cases are mostly archaic themselves). Sticking to yellow cars, een gele auto – twee gele auto's. Auto is masculine. Switching to a neuter noun, huis (house), we get een geel huis – twee gele huizen, so here the adjective changes with number. Now taking the definite version, het gele huis – de gele huizen, and again the adjective doesn't change with number. This schwa suffix is the only inflection you'll find on attributively used adjectives in contemporary (non-archaic) Dutch and it's only absent in neuter singular non-definite. English simply lost that last schwa suffix too. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:07, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Modern Dutch has roughly the same degree of inflectional decay that 14th-century English did, especially when you take into account that many of the written "-n" inflectional endings are not pronounced in the spoken language... AnonMoos (talk) 22:13, 19 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Why does the genitive/possessive ending -'s also not go to attributes, like this's little's boy's dog and these's littles' boys' dogs? --40bus (talk) 05:26, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This and little are adjectives, not nouns. Nouns possess things. Adjectives don't. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:10, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

40bus -- It worked that way in Latin, and it partly works that way in modern German, but 1) Early Germanic had a distinction between "strong" adjective inflections and "weak" adjective inflections, and an "-s" genitive case ending was only used in the masculine and neuter singular of strong adjectives. Everywhere else, it was not used. 2) English inflections have been decaying for a long time. By Chaucer's era, 600 or more years ago, the only adjective inflection left was a schwa vowel which was suffixed to some adjectives in certain circumstances (other adjectives didn't inflect at all, except for comparative and superlative of course). 3) In modern English, the "-s'" suffix is not really a genitive case ending, but a possessive clitic, which can show up in various positions ("The king of England's hat" etc etc). AnonMoos (talk) 07:14, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Noting a misspelled middle initial

I wrote out a reference at WP as such: "Census of 1910. The printing house was founded by Charles I. [F.] Willey in 1899. Home: Manhattan. Born: Illinois, 1859." Now, the name of the printing house founder was Charles I. Willey. However, in the Census of 1910, his name is misspelled as Charles F. Willey. Is this the correct way to signify, that one needs to search under Charles F. Willey to find the name Charles I. Willey? I put the misspelled initial in brackets, and also italicized. Thanks. Jim Percy (talk) 13:08, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

1. Are you absolutely certain the census entry refers to the correct Charles Willey? The further back you go, the more static -- and the more slippery -- some people can be.

2. Middle names are often not regulated. Someone born John A. Smith can have a nickname "Buck" and decide to go by, later in life, "Buck J. Smith" or "Buck J. A. Smith" or "J. A. Buck Smith" if more formal, etc.

Given this, finding the source of where the I. and F. come from, and which if any were legal or given at birth, might be (or might not be, if he's not worth it) a worthwhile hunt. SamuelRiv (talk) 13:21, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Another possibility is that "F" was "I's" son or nephew. Families owning commercial operations sometimes like to use similar names in successive generations to suggest stability: an example is the publishers John Murray, which was headed by seven successive "John Murrays" over the period 1768-2002 (not all father and son). [I worked under "John Murray VII".] {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.209.121.96 (talk) 14:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I just looked up his name again in the Census of 1910. Maybe it was written down by the original censor as "I", but a latter-day government worker translated it as following (three separate lines via copy & paste routine): "Name / Charles F Willey / [Charles I Willey]." His occupation is stated as "printer", and industry as "printing industry." Okay, so maybe I will just delete the [F.] part, since the translator is saying it's an "F", but could be an "I." PS. Yes, I'm certain. I've seen his name in vintage magazine articles as "Charles I. Willey." Thanks. Jim Percy (talk) 15:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The census taker (not "censor") wrote it as "I" in 1910. Note that same peculiar-looking "I" on his birthplace, "Illinois". The "F" was a mis-transcription by whoever keyed the information in. I have found plenty of errors in census records in my own family (made by both census takers and transcribers). You should be safe going with "I". No "F". <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 18:05, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Right. "census taker" and "transcriber" = correct wordings. Thks. Jim Percy (talk) 19:17, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I use the term "transcriber", but in some cases, "translator" may be more fitting. :) <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 02:19, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]