Bernhard
On 2 May 2014 21:51, Bernhard Rupp <hofkristall...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Nonetheless, this does not necessarily discredit my quest for a
> descriptive adjective, and the
> absence of such after this lively engagement might indicate that the
> question was not quite as
> illegitimate as it might have appeared even to the cognoscenti at first
> sight. Nonetheless,
>
> a toast to Sohncke!
>
I second that, but while not intending in any way to belittle Sohncke's
contribution to the subject, I would point out that Sohncke is a noun (of
kind "proper noun") and most definitely not an adjective (of any kind). I
say that because I have been working all along on the assumption that your
quest was for an adjective (i.e. as you say above, a descriptor of a noun).
In the English language at least, adjectives come in 5 different flavours:
1) attributive ("the good book"), 2) predicative ("this book is good"), 3)
absolute ("this book, good though it is, won't win the Booker", 4) nounal
adjective ("the good, the bad and the ugly"), and 5) postpositive
(adjective follows noun: mostly archaic usage in English though common
syntax in other languages). Of course nouns can also function as
adjectives ("adjectival noun") but only in a very limited way. In
particular nouns can only function as attributive adjectives ("a Sohncke
space group"). You can't use a noun as a predicative adjective ("this
space group is Sohncke" just doesn't sound right), or use an adjectival
noun in any of the other 3 ways; it can only function as the attribute of
another noun. A true adjective can be used in all 5 ways without breaking
the syntactical rules, e.g. the attributive "a centrosymmetric space group"
and the predicative "this space group is centrosymmetric" are both valid
syntax (I hesitate to use the "e" word again having had it ruled totally
out of contention). Exceedingly descriptive though it is,
"chirality-preserving" is technically also not an adjective (it's an
adjectival phrase), though of course that's no reason to rule it out.
Some proper nouns (mostly names of mathematicians for some reason!) have
been transformed into real adjectives (e.g. "Hessian" in honour of Ludwig
Otto Hesse, "Wronskian" for Józef Hoene-Wronski, and several others).
Sadly Sohncke is not one of those in common, or indeed any, usage in
adjectival form (I would hesitate to suggest "Sohnckian" as the adjective
derived from the proper noun). As an aside, strangely many of these
name-derived adjectives have made the reverse journey and now double as
true nouns themselves, having dropped the nouns to which they were
originally attached. "Hessian" as a true noun (i.e. not even a nounal
adjective) is of course now used in preference to and is a synonym for the
original "Hessian matrix", "Wronskian" is used instead of "Wronskian
determinant", etc.
Enough of this drivel. You can tell it's the weekend, and that none of us
have anything better to do ...
Cheers
-- Ian
