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This is a labubu. Now there is another one. There are two _______. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Las bubu. Like those monsters who insist on "attorneys general".

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (9 children)
    • mothers-in-law
    • passers-by
    • governors general
    • notaries public
    • sergeants major
    • editors-in-chief

    It follows a rule about compound nouns that is taught quickly around the 7th grade.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    It follows French, where the adjective comes after the noun.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    I don't really understand the connection, since French has plural adjectives and English doesn't. And in my head, that was also why the above list is the way it is- English doesn't have plural adjectives, so of course you denote the plural through the noun. If it were French, it would be more like attornies generals. Not to mention that some adjectives go before the noun in French, and for those, it's still both the adjective and the noun being made plural at the same time. I'm not a linguist, and also neither native in English nor French, can you explain?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Lots of modern English words came from French, especially Norman French.

    These modern English phrases that follow this “noun then adjective” are French loan phrases (I think). Or, they were constructed to look like French loans, because French was the language of the nobility, a “higher” way of speaking than dirty, peasant English.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I still don't really understand how that pertains to why the plural -s goes with the noun in fixed phrases like attorney general

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Because English doesn't pluralize adjectives. English is a mutt of a language, and it doesn't always make sense.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's just what English does, and I don't see what it has to do with french.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    These phrases are heavily influenced by French, even if they don't follow all of the exact same rules. "Not pluralizing adjectives" is a more ingrained rule of English than "adjectives come before nouns," so with these phrases, the latter rule is set aside in favor of "Frenchness" while the former rule remains in place.

    The messiness of English is directly because of all the different influences from other peoples and their languages over the centuries; it's not "just what English does" without reason.

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