On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 10:15, R.S. <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's pleonasm. > > BTW: In Poland we also call it "masło maślane". > It is hard to translate since masło is butter - noun (substantive). And > maślane is butter - but adjective. > What a language cannot distinguish between noun and adjective! English > has definitely to many overloaded words. ;-)
English has been losing its inflections for centuries. It's even arguable that it's mostly moved from being a synthetic to an analytic language. So there's generally no need to morphologically distinguish adjectives from nouns. And English has noun stacks. Despite what they teach in grade school "grammar", a noun can modify another, e.g. one can say "table leg" rather than forcing some adjectival form like tabular leg. And another, and so on. The magazine New Scientist some years ago had a noun stack competition. I don't know the winning entry, but I think "New Scientist magazine noun stack contest submission date cutoff" gets the idea across, even if it starts with an adjective as part of the name. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
