Skip to main content

parts of speech - Is "British" a noun or an adjective in "British PM"?


While reading through this question another occurred to me. If a headline reads



British PM says no to inflatable cars.



Is British a noun or an adjective? Granted, there are other noun forms of British but how about French in



French PM says yes!



The example from the original question quoted



Yemen PM Escapes Assassination



Since the adjective for the people of Yemen is Yemeni, this is clearly a noun adjunct. However, in those cases where the noun and the adjective forms are the same (British, French, Greek, Italian etc.) as in the example above, are these adjectives or nouns? They can be taken as either.



Answer



This is just headliner confusion. British is virtually always an adjective, not a noun. The noun is Britain. But headlines of late have been using the shorter noun forms, as in Spain court in lieu of Spanish court. I wouldn’t recommend it outside of headlines, if even there.


Be that as it may, we aren’t going to start calling British, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese “nouns” just because their corresponding noun forms are now getting used as noun-adjuncts in headline English.


One example of British as a noun might be:



We haven’t seen many British around here lately.



Although another is:



We haven’t seen many Britishers around here lately.



Neither of those is particularly well thought of. In writing, Briton is usually preferred:



We haven’t seen many Britons around here lately.



But that can of course be misheard in speech as:



We haven’t seen many *Britains around here lately.



Which is one reason why it tends to be shorted to the casual:



We haven’t seen many Brits around here lately.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more