Timeline for Why don't adjectives agree with nouns in English?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
31 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 11, 2017 at 21:41 | answer | added | Ira K. | timeline score: 1 | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 11:52 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 8, 2017 at 15:07 | |||||
| Apr 7, 2017 at 10:15 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglish/status/850290903973605376 | ||
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:32 | history | edited | Dog Lover | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 4 characters in body
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| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:32 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @Mari-LouA Fair enough. I shall do that. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:29 | comment | added | fixer1234 | @Mari-LouA, you don't remember where you got it from? Sounds like languages may not be providing the mythical benefit. :-) | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:25 | comment | added | dangph | English is a kind of creole language, a mixture of Germanic languages and French. Creoles tend to be grammatically more simple than their parent languages. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:22 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | @fixer1234 there's something to be said about speaking two or more languages and/or learning a new language, I've read it wards off alzheimer's and dementia, but I don't remember where I got it from, so maybe it's just a myth. Good exercise for the brain, all the same. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:16 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @Jacinto Hence 'arguable'. I'm not even going to go into what the consensus is when speaking about poodles of said colour. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:09 | comment | added | Jacinto | @EdwinAshworth It's a curious exception though: the form of the adjective depends on the person you're talking about, not necessarily the noun being modified: a boy with blond hair, a girl with blonde hair. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 8:00 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @EdwinAshworth Of course! | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:52 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | According to Collins, there is at least one arguable exception. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:29 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @fixer1234 There are many rules that will help you guess the gender of a noun. As Mari-Lou says, the general rule is that words in -o are masculine and those in -a are feminine. Words in -e can be either (or sometimes both), but most are masculine. Then there are particular suffixes that always form words of a specific gender: -(z)ione (= English -(t)ion) always forms feminines, for example. And then there are all the exceptions (like feminine mano or masculine poeta). So it’s both: general rules that help, but you still need to know it for each word. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:29 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | @JanusBahsJacquet No, I did not know why, it's good know whom I can blame now :) You never fail to amaze me with your polyglotism. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:24 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @Mari-LouA Just in case you don’t already know this (you probably do, but still): the reason problema is masculine is that it comes from an Ancient Greek class of neuter nouns that end in -ma (in Greek, their plural ends in -mata, like stigma/stigmata, but this is of course lost in most cases in the modern languages). Neuter words nearly always became masculine when the neuter gender was lost in the Romance languages. If you have a noun ending in -ma in Italian/Spanish/Portuguese (or -me in French), there’s a very good chance it’s masculine. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:15 | comment | added | user66974 | @Mari-LouA - spell-checkers traps... no, a native Italian would never say "la problema" or "il mano" even without any education...these are typical NNSs mistakes. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:12 | comment | added | user66974 | @fixer1234 - the gender agreement is probably the main mistake that non-native speakers make even after years they have been living in countries like France of Italy for instance. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 7:09 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | @fixer1234 there's no memorization involved, it comes naturally to native speakers. Although grammatical errors and slip ups can occur that's the same for any speaker, regardless of the language they speak. I chose the noun problema for two reasons; it's easy for English speakers to recognise, and because those pesky Italians had to write it with the suffix -a which is normally feminine, compare bambino (male baby) and bambina (female baby). There are loads of similar irregularities in the Italian language. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 6:59 | comment | added | fixer1234 | @Mari-LouA, is there a simple, rule-based logic for assigning gender to words, or do language learners basically just need to memorize the gender of every word? | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 6:50 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | @fixer1234 in English, the adjective does not have to agree with noun gender e.g. "a difficult problem". In Italian, "problem" is masculine and is written problema, the indefinite article agrees with the gender: un problema difficile, but when Italians pluralize the noun, they also have to pluralize the adjective: two difficult problems = due problemi difficili | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 6:21 | answer | added | user66974 | timeline score: 21 | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 6:16 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | English is Germanic—there is no “largely French/Latin origin”. There are many loan words from French and Latin, but the language itself is Germanic. Of course, nearly all other Germanic languages have both genders and noun–adjective agreement as well, so it's not the origin of the language that explains it. English used to have extensive agreement as well, but has lost it because unstressed final syllables have been lost—that simple. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:50 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @fixer1234 Potentially. But we do have plurals! | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:49 | comment | added | fixer1234 | Could the argument be made that they do "agree" since there is nothing to disagree about in English (no gender-based forms in that sense)? | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:44 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @fixer1234 I'm average at best at French, so I understand. If I put it another way, the adjective "blanc" ("white") would not agree with the noun if it kept its masculine form: "la maison blanc" - wrong. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:44 | comment | added | Jim | I think you just need to switch your viewpoint and consider that they always make agreement but since there is no difference in noun forms there is also no difference in the adjective forms. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:41 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @Jim It's not so much that they don't agree semantically, it's that they don't agree grammatically when compared to other European languages like French. I'm by no means criticising English - I love the language! - but I'm just curious as to why, being a European language, it does not have adjective-noun agreements. | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:39 | comment | added | Dog Lover | @fixer1234 Noun agreement. I probably should have been clearer. Similar to French how you'll have colours "agree" with a feminine noun, e.g. "la maison blanche". | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:38 | comment | added | Jim | Can you provide some examples of where they don’t agree, but could under some different system? | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:37 | comment | added | fixer1234 | What nature of agreement are you referring to? | |
| Apr 7, 2017 at 5:31 | history | asked | Dog Lover | CC BY-SA 3.0 |