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"Busier" versus/vs. "More Busy"

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Ant

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Sep 23, 2014, 3:45:23 PM9/23/14
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Hello.

Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
busier/more busy than before."

Thank you in advance. :)
--
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body, he had also become aware of all the other ants in the nest. It was
a bewildering feeling, as if his mind had shattered into thousands of
fragments, yet each fragment remained a coherent part of the whole."
--Colin Wilson, Spider World: The Desert (1987), p. 57
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Don Phillipson

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Sep 23, 2014, 3:52:36 PM9/23/14
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"Ant" <ANT...@zimage.com> wrote in message
news:m--dneYjS-pOULzJ...@earthlink.com...

> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
> busier/more busy than before."

No technical rule exists that could tell us one form is more "technically
correct" than the other. We may have preferences, e.g. preferring
to copy some historical model, but the bases of such preferences
do not qualify as rules.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)


Mike L

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Sep 23, 2014, 6:04:02 PM9/23/14
to
On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:52:36 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
<e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:

>"Ant" <ANT...@zimage.com> wrote in message
>news:m--dneYjS-pOULzJ...@earthlink.com...
>
>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
>> busier/more busy than before."
>
>No technical rule exists that could tell us one form is more "technically
>correct" than the other. We may have preferences, e.g. preferring
>to copy some historical model, but the bases of such preferences
>do not qualify as rules.

They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect. For reasons I don't
understand, comparatives with "more" are now being used by many native
speakers, and probably wouldn't usually be noticed, though to me they
sound foreign.

--
Mike.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 23, 2014, 7:27:07 PM9/23/14
to
The problem comes when you want to combine two or more adjectives whose
comparatives do not form the same way, eg My life these days is busier
but more interesting - that one doesn't seem to be a problem, but
sometimes, you get the urge to combine them both with a "more".

--
Robert Bannister - 1940-71 SE England
1972-now W Australia

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 23, 2014, 9:00:46 PM9/23/14
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On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 3:45:23 PM UTC-4, Ant wrote:

> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
> busier/more busy than before."

Normally, one- or two-syllable adjectives form their comparative with
-er, longer ones with "more." Others seem to have been thinking up
reasons for doing it differently.

> Thank you in advance. :)

You will be welcome.

Guy Barry

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Sep 24, 2014, 4:43:39 AM9/24/14
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"Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
news:40dec360-4d8f-4ceb...@googlegroups.com...
>
>On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 3:45:23 PM UTC-4, Ant wrote:
>
>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
>> busier/more busy than before."
>
>Normally, one- or two-syllable adjectives form their comparative with
>-er, longer ones with "more."

Would that it were that simple. Certainly disyllabic adjectives in "-y"
form their comparative in "-er", as do many others; but there are just as
many that don't, e.g. "cheerful", "special", "comic", "famous", "active".

--
Guy Barry

Bertel Lund Hansen

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Sep 24, 2014, 5:38:43 AM9/24/14
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Mike L skrev:

> They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
> non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
> horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect. For reasons I don't
> understand, comparatives with "more" are now being used by many native
> speakers, and probably wouldn't usually be noticed, though to me they
> sound foreign.

Danish forms comparatives the same way that English does, either
with "mere" or by adding "-ere" to the adjective (there may be
other changes in some words).

r�d, r�dere, r�dest (red)

interessant, mere interessant, mest interessant

There is a rule of thumb: long adjectives use the "mere" method.
But I don't think that many people would mind if it were used
with small words, and there are some adjectives where both forms
are used by the same persons.

Den der er mere r�d end den anden.

That one is reder? more red? than the other one.

--
Bertel, Denmark

Jerry Friedman

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Sep 24, 2014, 10:22:57 AM9/24/14
to
Can't we stop this? I heard "more happy" recently, and I don't think it
was paired with another word that didn't take "more".

--
Jerry Friedman

Mike L

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Sep 24, 2014, 5:31:31 PM9/24/14
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It's too near bedtime, especially with this gin, for me to think
clearly about this; but I'm starting to think it depends less on
length than on the way each adjective is _formed_. Before I splash out
another pink 'un and retire, I wonder if it's "more" for adjs more
obviously formed by adding a suffix, regardless of syllable count.

--
Mike.

Mike L

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Sep 24, 2014, 5:32:35 PM9/24/14
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When I read that, I ain't the most happy fella.

--
Mike.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 24, 2014, 7:44:49 PM9/24/14
to
On 24/09/2014 5:38 pm, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> Mike L skrev:
>
>> They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
>> non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
>> horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect. For reasons I don't
>> understand, comparatives with "more" are now being used by many native
>> speakers, and probably wouldn't usually be noticed, though to me they
>> sound foreign.
>
> Danish forms comparatives the same way that English does, either
> with "mere" or by adding "-ere" to the adjective (there may be
> other changes in some words).
>
> rød, rødere, rødest (red)
>
> interessant, mere interessant, mest interessant
>
> There is a rule of thumb: long adjectives use the "mere" method.
> But I don't think that many people would mind if it were used
> with small words, and there are some adjectives where both forms
> are used by the same persons.
>
> Den der er mere rød end den anden.
>
> That one is reder? more red? than the other one.
>
Can we then blame our weird system on the Norse instead of on the French
(who were originally Norsemen anyway)?

By contrast, as I am sure you know, Bertel, German has
interessant, interessanter, interessantest, and they are no harder to
say than our "more, most" forms.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 24, 2014, 7:48:17 PM9/24/14
to
I had been thinking it was the ones from French or Latin that required
"more/most", but that doesn't explain "cheerful". Although is "full"
like "unique"? - I'm happy to say "fuller" and "fullest", but I can see
that for some people the glass is either full or it's not.

Peter Moylan

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Sep 24, 2014, 9:47:47 PM9/24/14
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Germans are tolerant of long words, while the Danes have a passion for
short words.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Peter Moylan

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Sep 24, 2014, 9:49:20 PM9/24/14
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So there are two ways of saying it. I don't see that as a great evil.

Jerry Friedman

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Sep 24, 2014, 11:23:07 PM9/24/14
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On 9/24/14 5:48 PM, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 25/09/2014 5:31 am, Mike L wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:43:39 +0100, "Guy Barry"
>> <guy....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> "Peter T. Daniels" wrote in message
>>> news:40dec360-4d8f-4ceb...@googlegroups.com...
>>>>
>>>> On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 3:45:23 PM UTC-4, Ant wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
>>>>> busier/more busy than before."
>>>>
>>>> Normally, one- or two-syllable adjectives form their comparative with
>>>> -er, longer ones with "more."
>>>
>>> Would that it were that simple. Certainly disyllabic adjectives in "-y"
>>> form their comparative in "-er", as do many others; but there are
>>> just as
>>> many that don't, e.g. "cheerful", "special", "comic", "famous",
>>> "active".
>>
>> It's too near bedtime, especially with this gin, for me to think
>> clearly about this; but I'm starting to think it depends less on
>> length than on the way each adjective is _formed_. Before I splash out
>> another pink 'un and retire, I wonder if it's "more" for adjs more
>> obviously formed by adding a suffix, regardless of syllable count.

I think any disyllable ending with Cy (C = consonant) can take -er, even
if the y is obviously a suffix, as in "lucky".

On the other hand, adjectives formed with the suffix -ed can't take -er,
regardless of syllable count.

> I had been thinking it was the ones from French or Latin that required
> "more/most",

That's actually a fairly good rule of thumb, I believe, but it has
exceptions. (If I left them out, you'd tell me I'd just said the
stupidest thing you ever heard.)

> but that doesn't explain "cheerful". Although is "full"
> like "unique"? - I'm happy to say "fuller" and "fullest", but I can see
> that for some people the glass is either full or it's not.

Surely one can be more or less cheerful, though.

--
Jerry Friedman
Solider Aristotle played the taws/ Upon the bottom of a king of kings.

Jerry Friedman

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Sep 25, 2014, 12:09:35 AM9/25/14
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It's not evil that there are two ways of saying it. It's only evil when
people use the second one.

Turning to matters of fact, I was a bit surprised to see that "happier"
increased steadily at the expense of "more happy" till 2000 at GB, and
since 2000 is where the make-up of the corpus started to change, you
can't tell much from the decline since then.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=happier%2Fmore+happy&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28happier%20/%20more%20happy%29%3B%2Cc0

http://tinyurl.com/klhrwqb

--
Jerry Friedman

Bertel Lund Hansen

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Sep 25, 2014, 3:33:55 AM9/25/14
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Peter Moylan skrev:

>> By contrast, as I am sure you know, Bertel, German has
>> interessant, interessanter, interessantest, and they are no harder to
>> say than our "more, most" forms.

> Germans are tolerant of long words, while the Danes have a
> passion for short words.

I don't think you can find evidence to support that claim. In
Danish compound words are written as one, and that means that we
can produce long words where English would split them up.

In theory they can be infinitely long, so it is possible to find
extremely long words on the net, but they usually appear only in
contests about finding the longest word. There is a natural limit
somewhere where the readability becomes too difficult, but this
word appears in a Danish novel as a joking transmogrification of
the title "senior teacher":

Overbarnenumseømhedsfabrikant
=~ Super child bottom pain manufacturer

--
Bertel, Denmark

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 25, 2014, 9:01:48 AM9/25/14
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On 2014-09-25, Bertel Lund Hansen <kanon...@lundhansen.dk> wrote:

>> Germans are tolerant of long words, while the Danes have a
>> passion for short words.
>
> I don't think you can find evidence to support that claim. In
> Danish compound words are written as one, and that means that we
> can produce long words where English would split them up.

Again, that's just a question of orthography. English can produce
large "noun pile" compounds with the best of them. On sherdog.com,
they're very fond of the term

Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championships gold medalist

If English were spelled like a Germanic language and not like French,
there would be a lot fewer spaces in that.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 25, 2014, 10:26:07 AM9/25/14
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On 2014-09-24, Robert Bannister <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote:

>> rød, rødere, rødest (red)
>> interessant, mere interessant, mest interessant
>
> Can we then blame our weird system on the Norse instead of on the French
> (who were originally Norsemen anyway)?

Well, I'd like to see you blame the "most" construction on the
French.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 25, 2014, 7:46:52 PM9/25/14
to
On 25/09/2014 10:26 pm, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2014-09-24, Robert Bannister <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote:
>
>>> rød, rødere, rødest (red)
>>> interessant, mere interessant, mest interessant
>>
>> Can we then blame our weird system on the Norse instead of on the French
>> (who were originally Norsemen anyway)?
>
> Well, I'd like to see you blame the "most" construction on the
> French.
>
I'm not very familiar with Anglo-Saxon, but I would have guessed that
-er, -(e)st constructions were the norm. I am happy to be told
otherwise. Unless you meant that even Latin has special comparative and
superlative forms and does not need more/most, but that would still put
the blame on French.

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 25, 2014, 11:23:30 PM9/25/14
to
Lat. does inflect for comparative and superlative.

Athel Cornish-Bowden

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Sep 26, 2014, 11:16:33 AM9/26/14
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On 2014-09-24 00:04:02 +0200, Mike L <n...@yahoo.co.uk> said:

> On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:52:36 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
> <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:
>
>> "Ant" <ANT...@zimage.com> wrote in message
>> news:m--dneYjS-pOULzJ...@earthlink.com...
>>
>>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
>>> busier/more busy than before."
>>
>> No technical rule exists that could tell us one form is more "technically
>> correct" than the other. We may have preferences, e.g. preferring
>> to copy some historical model, but the bases of such preferences
>> do not qualify as rules.
>
> They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
> non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
> horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect.

Three or four years ago George Hardy said at alt.english.usage that my
opinion about a matter of English usage could obviously be discounted
as I had written "commoner", which he regarded as illiterate. He is
still around at alt.english.usage but I don't think he has visited aue.


> For reasons I don't
> understand, comparatives with "more" are now being used by many native
> speakers, and probably wouldn't usually be noticed, though to me they
> sound foreign.


--
athel

Mike L

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Sep 26, 2014, 3:58:57 PM9/26/14
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On Fri, 26 Sep 2014 17:16:33 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>On 2014-09-24 00:04:02 +0200, Mike L <n...@yahoo.co.uk> said:
>
>> On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:52:36 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
>> <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> "Ant" <ANT...@zimage.com> wrote in message
>>> news:m--dneYjS-pOULzJ...@earthlink.com...
>>>
>>>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
>>>> busier/more busy than before."
>>>
>>> No technical rule exists that could tell us one form is more "technically
>>> correct" than the other. We may have preferences, e.g. preferring
>>> to copy some historical model, but the bases of such preferences
>>> do not qualify as rules.
>>
>> They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
>> non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
>> horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect.
>
>Three or four years ago George Hardy said at alt.english.usage that my
>opinion about a matter of English usage could obviously be discounted
>as I had written "commoner", which he regarded as illiterate. He is
>still around at alt.english.usage but I don't think he has visited aue.

Perhaps he got a flea in his ear here. "Commoner" is absolutely all
right, though "more common" is also available. I pray in aid the
Oxford guide.
>
>
>> For reasons I don't
>> understand, comparatives with "more" are now being used by many native
>> speakers, and probably wouldn't usually be noticed, though to me they
>> sound foreign.

--
Mike.

John Varela

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Sep 26, 2014, 4:16:45 PM9/26/14
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On Fri, 26 Sep 2014 15:16:33 UTC, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> On 2014-09-24 00:04:02 +0200, Mike L <n...@yahoo.co.uk> said:
>
> > On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:52:36 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
> > <e9...@SPAMBLOCK.ncf.ca> wrote:
> >
> >> "Ant" <ANT...@zimage.com> wrote in message
> >> news:m--dneYjS-pOULzJ...@earthlink.com...
> >>
> >>> Is "busier" technically correct and "more busy" isn't? "I have been
> >>> busier/more busy than before."
> >>
> >> No technical rule exists that could tell us one form is more "technically
> >> correct" than the other. We may have preferences, e.g. preferring
> >> to copy some historical model, but the bases of such preferences
> >> do not qualify as rules.
> >
> > They can amount to rules of style, though. Which means that
> > non-experts should generally avoid "breaking" them. "More busy" is
> > horribly bad style, if not actually incorrect.
>
> Three or four years ago George Hardy said at alt.english.usage that my
> opinion about a matter of English usage could obviously be discounted
> as I had written "commoner", which he regarded as illiterate. He is
> still around at alt.english.usage but I don't think he has visited aue.

AEU is moribund. Today it had two new posts while AUE has over 300.

--
John Varela

Robert Bannister

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Sep 26, 2014, 7:37:18 PM9/26/14
to
That's what I said: "even Latin has special comparative and superlative
forms".

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 26, 2014, 10:51:31 PM9/26/14
to
"Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.

Except the suppletive melior > mieux.

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 27, 2014, 10:21:39 AM9/27/14
to
On 2014-09-25, Robert Bannister <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote:

>> Well, I'd like to see you blame the "most" construction on the
>> French.
>>
> I'm not very familiar with Anglo-Saxon, but I would have guessed that
> -er, -(e)st constructions were the norm. I am happy to be told
> otherwise. Unless you meant that even Latin has special comparative and
> superlative forms and does not need more/most, but that would still put
> the blame on French.

You misunderstood my point. Let's try again.

English has inflectional comparatives and superlatives
(1) ADJ-er, ADJ-est
and analytic ones:
(2) more ADJ, most ADJ

French meanwhile has only an analytic construction:
(3) plus ADJ, le plus ADJ

Now, if you look closely, you'll see that the English and French
analytic superlatives are _not_ equivalent. If English followed
the French pattern, instead of "most ADJ" it would use *"the more ADJ",
but that means something else in English.

I don't know the history of adjective comparison in English (presumably
it is well-researched), but it's hard to blame the analytic
construction on French influence when it is different from the one
actually used in French.

And the Viking settlers in England didn't speak modern Danish but
Old Norse. As far as I can google up quickly, Old Norse also used
the Germanic inflectional comparative and superlative forms.

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 27, 2014, 10:39:29 AM9/27/14
to
On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> That's what I said: "even Latin has special comparative and superlative
>> forms".
>
> "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.
>
> Except the suppletive melior > mieux.

That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).

There's also pejor > pire and pejus > pis.

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 27, 2014, 3:13:02 PM9/27/14
to
On Saturday, September 27, 2014 10:39:29 AM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> >> That's what I said: "even Latin has special comparative and superlative
> >> forms".
> > "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.
> > Except the suppletive melior > mieux.
>
> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).

Cute. And strange, no?

> There's also pejor > pire and pejus > pis.

Tant pis!

(Never encountered either word in any other context.)

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 27, 2014, 6:47:08 PM9/27/14
to
On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> > "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.
>> > Except the suppletive melior > mieux.
>>
>> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).
>
> Cute. And strange, no?

What's strange about it?

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 28, 2014, 8:37:30 AM9/28/14
to
On Saturday, September 27, 2014 6:47:08 PM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> >> > "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.
> >> > Except the suppletive melior > mieux.
> >> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).
> > Cute. And strange, no?
>
> What's strange about it?

An adverb becoming an adjective.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 28, 2014, 8:00:03 PM9/28/14
to
Many, perhaps most languages have no real distinction between adjectives
and adverbs. Most of the Slavonic languages use the neuter form of an
adjective as an adverb - of course, there are exceptions.

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 29, 2014, 7:24:57 AM9/29/14
to
Do you have other examples of ancestral adverbs becoming adjectives
in Romance languages?

In many languages, adjectives "are" verbs. In many languages (such as
Latin), adjectives "are" nouns. But that's not the question.

Christian Weisgerber

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Sep 29, 2014, 10:34:44 AM9/29/14
to
On 2014-09-28, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> >> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).
>> > Cute. And strange, no?
>>
>> What's strange about it?
>
> An adverb becoming an adjective.

"Melior" is an adjective.

Robert Bannister

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Sep 29, 2014, 8:32:14 PM9/29/14
to
On 29/09/2014 7:24 pm, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Sunday, September 28, 2014 8:00:03 PM UTC-4, Robert Bannister wrote:
>> On 28/09/2014 8:37 pm, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>> On Saturday, September 27, 2014 6:47:08 PM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>>>> On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>>>>>> "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into French.
>>>>>>> Except the suppletive melior > mieux.
>>>>>> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).
>>>>> Cute. And strange, no?
>>>> What's strange about it?
>>> An adverb becoming an adjective.
>>
>> Many, perhaps most languages have no real distinction between adjectives
>> and adverbs. Most of the Slavonic languages use the neuter form of an
>> adjective as an adverb - of course, there are exceptions.
>
> Do you have other examples of ancestral adverbs becoming adjectives
> in Romance languages?

I'm not sure what an ancestral adverb is, but a large number of French
adverbs are feminine adjectives plus "-ment" rather as many of ours are
adjective plus "-ly". OK, there are "bien, mieux, pis", but like English
"well", there aren't many of them.
>
> In many languages, adjectives "are" verbs. In many languages (such as
> Latin), adjectives "are" nouns. But that's not the question.
>
Good points. I tend to talk about the European languages I know about,
forgetting about the rest of the world.

Peter T. Daniels

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Sep 29, 2014, 11:18:06 PM9/29/14
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On Monday, September 29, 2014 8:32:14 PM UTC-4, Robert Bannister wrote:
> On 29/09/2014 7:24 pm, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Sunday, September 28, 2014 8:00:03 PM UTC-4, Robert Bannister wrote:
> >> On 28/09/2014 8:37 pm, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >>> On Saturday, September 27, 2014 6:47:08 PM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> >>>> On 2014-09-27, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> >>>>>>> "Unless you meant" suggested doubt. Yet they didn't continue into
> >>>>>>> French. Except the suppletive melior > mieux.
> >>>>>> That's melior > meilleur (adj) and melius > mieux (adv).
> >>>>> Cute. And strange, no?
> >>>> What's strange about it?
> >>> An adverb becoming an adjective.
> >> Many, perhaps most languages have no real distinction between adjectives
> >> and adverbs. Most of the Slavonic languages use the neuter form of an
> >> adjective as an adverb - of course, there are exceptions.
> > Do you have other examples of ancestral adverbs becoming adjectives
> > in Romance languages?
>
> I'm not sure what an ancestral adverb is, but a large number of French
> adverbs are feminine adjectives plus "-ment" rather as many of ours are
> adjective plus "-ly". OK, there are "bien, mieux, pis", but like English
> "well", there aren't many of them.

That's synchronic derivation rather than diacronic development.

pauljk

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Oct 2, 2014, 1:36:14 AM10/2/14
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"Robert Bannister" <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote in message news:c8rlo6...@mid.individual.net...
Can you give some examples of the Slavic neuter form of an adjective
being an adverb, for the hell of me I can't think of a single example
in WSlavic.

pjk

James Hogg

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Oct 2, 2014, 2:02:22 AM10/2/14
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Russian "veroyatno" (probably)

--
James

Robert Bannister

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Oct 2, 2014, 7:24:35 PM10/2/14
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malo, ploxo (losho po nashe), dobro, xorosho, ladno (Russian - means
cold in some languages), some of the words for to/on the
left/right/straight on like desno, pravilno, brzo (quickly), and many
more - these are just off the top of my heard.

pauljk

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Oct 3, 2014, 11:13:14 PM10/3/14
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"Robert Bannister" <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote in message news:c9655m...@mid.individual.net...
Perhaps you didn't quite see what I was objecting to, which was
your "Most of the Slavonic languages" which you based on your
knowledge of Russian. I said I couldn't think of a single example
in Western Slavic. I excluded Russian on purpose because I know
the language and I know that many Russian adverbs look like neuter
adjectives. I guess it is a mere coincidence because it's not a general
feature in the Slavic family of languages.

Examples of Polish and Czech adjectives and adverbs:

Good man.
Good desk.
Good pig.
Good wife.
Good situation.
Well managed situation.

Dobry człowiek.
Dobre biurko.
Dobra świnia.
Dobra żona.
Dobra sytuacja.
Dobrze zarządzane sytuację.

Dobrý člověk.
Dobrý stůl.
Dobré prase.
Dobrá manželka.
Dobrá situace.
Dobře řízená situace.

The adverb is clearly quite different construct from adjectives of all genders.
The same distinction exists in plurals of adjectives.

pjk














Robert Bannister

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Oct 4, 2014, 8:45:27 PM10/4/14
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[examples snipped]
> The adverb is clearly quite different construct from adjectives of all
> genders.
> The same distinction exists in plurals of adjectives.

And I only know a little Russian and Macedonian, which are very
different from each other, but both use adverbs ending in -o as does
Ukrainian, Serbian and Croatian. Polish is very different from the other
Slavic languages. I hadn't realised Czech and Slovak were too.

pauljk

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Oct 5, 2014, 4:42:28 AM10/5/14
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"Robert Bannister" <rob...@clubtelco.com> wrote in message news:c9bila...@mid.individual.net...
Yes, all six of the contemporary Western Slavic languages as well as
their many dialects are markedly different from the East and South
Slavic subfamilies.

pjk

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