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getting there, thanks.
I just think "toy" is a strange adjective in this case.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Er--the higher powers were playing with them?
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We use "toy" as an adjective for many things: little toy house (speelgoedhuisje), little toy soldiers, little toy cars, toy pistol (speelgoedpistool) etc. So a toy Court did not strike me as odd, the way it was used. Maybe this proves that any foreign language or culture you try to "learn" , if not from earliest childhood on, will for a part stay closed to you forever. I regularly meet the limits here.
>>Er--the higher powers were playing with them?
If you call the game of power a game.
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I don't think that the toy in toy court is an adjective, because it doesn't really behave like one. (It quacks like a noun.) For example, you can't really say that one court is toyer than another or that another is a very toy court. I think that what we have here is a good old nominal compound, like fire truck or baseball. But I will defend your right to call it an adjective if you want to.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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You are right, it does not behave like an adjective. It is no adjective. Nominal compound sounds good to me and your examples make it very clear.Thanks.
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I'd say the boundary between nouns and adjectives can be pretty fuzzy sometimes. In this case it's kind of a toy adjective.
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the boundary between nouns and adjectives can be pretty fuzzy sometimes
Yes, me, too, but I think that in this case toy is pretty much a noun. For an even fuzzier example, and one which sends grammatohooligans into conniption fits, try discerning when, how, and why an adverb differs from a verbal particle or a preposition.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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isn't it defining the court? telling us that it is a certain type of court? a "blue" court? a "hung" jury? a "toy" court?
I'm a "simple" guy, when it comes to this stuff, so call it what you will.
formerly known as etaoin...
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isn't it defining the court? telling us that it is a certain type of court? a "blue" court? a "hung" jury? a "toy" court?
I'm a "simple" guy, when it comes to this stuff, so call it what you will. Why, etaoin, did you put "simple" in quotation marks and which noun simple did you mean? (1) noun: any herbaceous plant having medicinal properties (2) noun: a person lacking intelligence or common sense 
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isn't it defining the court? telling us that it is a certain type of court? a "blue" court? a "hung" jury? a "toy" court?
Yes, toy is modifying (or qualifying if you will) court, but I don't see as that makes it an adjective.
1a. the blue court
1b. the very blue court
1c. the court is blue
1d. the court which is blue
1e. the bluer/bluest court
2a. the toy court
2b. *the very toy court (at least not in the sense of the court that was very toy)
2c. *the court is toy
2d. *the court which is toy
2e. *the toyer/toyest court
No matter what you want to call them, they (blue and toy) seem to be two different kinds of words. I tend to categorize words by what slots they can fill in a sentence's structure. So, because toy is modifying court doesn't mean, to me, that it is an adjective, but that it is a noun modifying another noun. We have plenty of compounds made up of two or more nouns. Would you say that in the phrase ancient history teacher that ancient history is an adjective? (Leaving aside the old joke of whether it's a history teacher who is ancient or a teacher of ancient history, but not a history teacher of ancient or a teacher who is ancient history.) Calling toy in this case an adjective complicates things syntactically because then you have to have two (or more) classes of adjective: some that act like normal adjectives (see examples 1 above) and others which act differently (i.e., like nouns but aren't, see 2 above).
[Edited by addition for more clarity.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 01/12/08 03:20 AM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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