• Gork@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      This is why we don’t have to conjugate our verbs, we make up for it with this very strict word order.

      It’s also probably why English as a Second Language is so difficult aside from the inconsistencies and exceptions.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English, and it’s fun to see English-speakers being perpetually confused about them. Namely about ‘I’/‘me’ and ‘who’/‘whom’. Since the word order and particles already handle the meaning of sentences, people don’t quite know why they need to modify the pronouns too. And don’t have the vocabulary for the rules, as grammatical cases are long forgotten.

        • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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          1 day ago

          Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English

          Plurals and the few gendered nouns we have left (actor/actress), also count as declension

    • spacesatan@leminal.space
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      2 days ago

      I feel like most of this can be flexible, especially origin or if you want to emphasize something.

      You could have a little Italian green knife. Or a copper French knife.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        That immediately sounds like ‘green knife’ and ‘French knife’ are some special kinds of knives, not just what they look like and where they’re from.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        The category order is generally more rigid toward the right half of the adjective list. So you could have an old thin bread knife or a thin old bread knife, but not an old bread thin knife.

    • Apeman42@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Ehh… I like the spirit of this, but it’s not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if “great dragons” are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you’d say Ghost is a “white dire wolf”, not a “dire white wolf”.

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        in that case, “great dragon” is the noun, and is consistent with the proposed rule

        • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          Yeah, that’s just an open compound word, like “emperor penguin” or “hammerhead shark.” We have open compounds where the component words are separated by a space, hyphenated compounds (not super common with animals but can be seen in words like “mother-in-law”) where the words are separated by a hyphen, and closed compounds that just stick the two words together (“kingfisher,” “anteater”).