Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English, and it’s fun to see English-speakers being perpetually confused about them. Namely about ‘I’/‘me’ and ‘who’/‘whom’. Since the word order and particles already handle the meaning of sentences, people don’t quite know why they need to modify the pronouns too. And don’t have the vocabulary for the rules, as grammatical cases are long forgotten.
Ehh… I like the spirit of this, but it’s not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if “great dragons” are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you’d say Ghost is a “white dire wolf”, not a “dire white wolf”.
Yeah, that’s just an open compound word, like “emperor penguin” or “hammerhead shark.” We have open compounds where the component words are separated by a space, hyphenated compounds (not super common with animals but can be seen in words like “mother-in-law”) where the words are separated by a hyphen, and closed compounds that just stick the two words together (“kingfisher,” “anteater”).
This is why we don’t have to conjugate our verbs, we make up for it with this very strict word order.
It’s also probably why English as a Second Language is so difficult aside from the inconsistencies and exceptions.
Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English, and it’s fun to see English-speakers being perpetually confused about them. Namely about ‘I’/‘me’ and ‘who’/‘whom’. Since the word order and particles already handle the meaning of sentences, people don’t quite know why they need to modify the pronouns too. And don’t have the vocabulary for the rules, as grammatical cases are long forgotten.
Ehh… I like the spirit of this, but it’s not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if “great dragons” are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you’d say Ghost is a “white dire wolf”, not a “dire white wolf”.
in that case, “great dragon” is the noun, and is consistent with the proposed rule
Yeah, that’s just an open compound word, like “emperor penguin” or “hammerhead shark.” We have open compounds where the component words are separated by a space, hyphenated compounds (not super common with animals but can be seen in words like “mother-in-law”) where the words are separated by a hyphen, and closed compounds that just stick the two words together (“kingfisher,” “anteater”).