Talk:List of irregular English adjectives

Great page, and other words

 * added header —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 20:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Great page! Note that some of the words listed are not in the dictionary however, such as otarine for seals is not in Webster's (even unabridged) There are other words that could be added to the list such as chthonic =pertaining to the underworld. Great work whoever put this together.

Here is what we really mean by irregular adjectives!
Yes, adjectives whose comparatives and superlatives are formed in an irregular way. Here are some example trios in the order of absolute, comparative, superlative good, better, best bad, worse, worst little, less, least many, more, most How did anyone miss out on these? D.A.W. 98.81.0.222 (talk) 19:59, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Adjective-to-noun list
I removed the adjective-to-noun list, because it's pointless. You can look up the adjective in any dictionary (including Wiktionary) and it will tell you what noun it refers to. The point of this list is to provide the reverse look-up, which dictionaries do not. Having two lists also made it much harder to maintain. Soo 15:02, 19 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Hold on, I'm confused. Did you remove the wrong list? I removed a couple of entries as they seemed pointless because the noun was just a synonym of another noun directly related to the adjective (e.g. commercial - business, when there is a noun commerce). However, if the purpose of this list is to enable noun-to-adjective lookup (e.g. I look up "business" and find "commercial") then maybe they should stay? But then why do we have an adjective-to-noun list and not a noun-to-adjective list?


 * FTR, these were the four I deleted:


 * edificial - buildings
 * commercial - business
 * sternal - breastbone
 * terminal - boundaries


 * Matt 02:35, 24 November 2005 (UTC).
 * Err, yes. It seems I deleted the wrong list. Don't fear, I'll re-sort the new list later today. I think the line as to what to keep and what to delete is very fine. I see your point that those adjectives clearly refer to other nouns, but if I wanted to use an adjective to refer to buildings then I could look up building in this list and find edificial. Otherwise I'd be stuck because there is no adjective directly from building (in fact that's the whole point of the list). So I think they are useful. (I edited your comment's indenting slightly, I hope you don't mind.) Soo 11:35, 24 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I did it... reinstated the four above, except I have "terminal" under "end", as "boundary" to me is not quite right. Along the way I lost "peripatetic - travel by foot or the teaching methods of Aristotle" and "psychosomatic - the link between body and mind" because I couldn't think of a single noun that anyone would use to look these up. Incidentally, I was tempted to make all the nouns singular, but won't if others think plural is right. Thoughts? Matt 13:56, 24 November 2005 (UTC).
 * I agree with everything you did. The odd ones about peripatetic and psychosomatic were the result of me altering wrong entries that were there already. I should probably have just deleted them. Anyway the list is looking good now. I'll continue to add to it as and when. Soo 20:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
 * What do you think about singular/plural nouns? I think I kind of understand why plural nouns were originally used, but I feel it would be cleaner if they were all singular (I added a ton more entries, and now we have a good mixture of both which is not ideal). Matt 23:04, 24 November 2005 (UTC).

Greek - where?
A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows:
 * French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
 * Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
 * Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
 * Greek: 5.32%
 * No etymology given: 4.03%
 * Derived from proper names: 3.28%
 * All other languages contributed less than 1%

Despite that, Matt sees fit to make this edit. Why? A reliabe source says that 5.32% of English words have Greek origin. It's misleading to set Greek alongside Latin, who contributed 28.24% of English vocabulary. There is a vast difference between those two figures. This seems like POV to me. Izehar 15:47, 26 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Even if this article was about words in general, a mention of Greek (at 5.32%) would be entirely reasonable. However, this article is not about words in general, it is about "non-standard adjectives", many of which are obscure words, as the article states. There are very many such adjectives derived from Greek, many of them obscure. If you know the relative figures for these types of words then please add this information to the article, or, if you like, amend it to say something like Greek "to a lesser extent" if you know this to be the case. Do not base your argument on the list as it stands because the list is incomplete, and I believe the Greek-derived words tend on balance to be more obscure than the Latin-derived ones. Please do NOT revert the entire edit again, and please do NOT label it "POV" or, even more ludicrously, "propaganda". I have no axe to grind here, I am simply making a factual observation. Matt 17:43, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

Postscript: I have added "to a lesser extent" as I believe this is very likely to be the case. Matt 17:56, 26 November 2005 (UTC).


 * Hmm... even if it is a facutal observation which seems to touch upon original research (!) and has no reliable source to support it - never mind, we'll base it on Matt's self-induced scholarly research. Why bother with losers like Oxford University Press, when we can quote Matt's publications. Sarcasm aside - despite these defects, I'll leave it alone as it makes sense and probably is true. If you find a source which confirms this, please add it to the references section (if there is one by then). Izehar 18:13, 26 November 2005 (UTC)


 * You still seem to be missing the point that the survey you quote is irrelevant. What we need is a survey of the origins of non-standard adjectives (including obscure ones), which is very likely to give totally different numbers. I searched Google, but, unsurprisingly, found nothing. Matt 18:16, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

Even so, that doesn't stop your version being original research - there are no sources to back it. Izehar 18:26, 26 November 2005 (UTC)


 * According to Collins English Dictionary, the origins of the first few adjectives in the list on this page are as follows:

ventral: Latin alvine: Latin celiac: Greek via Latin histrionic: Latin epithetic: Greek via Latin sensuous: Latin geriatric, gerontic: Greek geoponic: Greek georgic(al): Greek via Latin pneumatic: Greek via Latin aerial: Greek via Latin abecedarian: Latin succinic: Latin zoic, zoological: Greek astragalar: Greek via Latin

Matt19:44, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Move text back to "adjectives" article?
Much of the text on this page (but not the list itself) might do better on the main "Adjectives" page. There could be a section there on "adjectives of relation" (or whatever these things are technically called) which could mention the "standard" methods ("-ous", "-ic" etc.) and then explain the "non-standard" forms and link to the list. In particular, the para about "-ish", "-y" and "-like" is nothing to do with "non-standard" forms. Any thoughts? If no-one objects then I might just go ahead and do it anyway. Matt 22:00, 28 November 2005 (UTC).


 * Now done... Matt 01:27, 27 December 2005 (UTC).
 * I'm too late to support you but I would've done. Seems sensible to keep discussion in the main article and hold this purely as a reference list. Soo 02:54, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

you need to write something about ...... THE LAST RESORT BY CHRIS OWEN....

Transwiki
I’ve tagged the page to be transwikied to Wiktionary – it would make a splendid appendix there, with such neighbors as Appendix:English irregular verbs!
 * —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 20:51, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Collateral adjectives
When I think of "irregular adjectives", I think of adjectives that inflect irregularly, (such as good-better-best), not of adjectives with a different etymology from a noun with a related meaning (collateral adjectives). I therefore think that this page should be titled List of collateral English adjectives, whether here or at Wiktionary. A list of irregular English adjectives (in the inflectional sense) would be pretty short. Miss Madeline | Talk to Madeline 01:25, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree. -- Soap Talk/Contributions 13:08, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Proposals
Here, contributors should post irregular adjectives as for which they are not 100% sure whether or not they are correct. Please comment on the proposals and if you find they are correct add them to the main page.
 * angel - cherubic
 * food - alimentary
 * gall - bilious
 * punishment - punitive —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.129.230.205 (talk) 11:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * wood - ligneous

"A list of adjectives" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect A list of adjectives. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 July 4 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 15:04, 4 July 2020 (UTC)