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”).
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”).