A collateral adjective is an

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

that is identified with a particular

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

in meaning, but that is not derived from that noun. For example, the word ''bovine'' is considered the adjectival equivalent of the noun ''cow'', but it is derived from a different word, which happens to be the Latin word for "cow". Similarly, ''lunar'' serves as an adjective to describe attributes of the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

; ''moon'' comes from

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

''mōna'' "moon" and ''lunar'' from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

''luna'' "moon". The adjective ''thermal'' and the noun ''heat'' have a similar semantic relationship. As in these examples, collateral adjectives in English very often derive from the Latin or Greek translations of the corresponding nouns. In some cases both the noun and the adjective are borrowed, but from different languages, such as the noun ''air'' (from French) and the adjective ''aerial'' (from Latin). The term "collateral" refers to these two sides in the relationship. In English, most

ordinal numbers In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is a generalization of ordinal numerals (first, second, th, etc.) aimed to extend enumeration to infinite sets. A finite set can be enumerated by successively labeling each element with the least ...

sound like their

cardinal numbers In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. The ...

, such as the ordinal 3rd (third) sounding like the cardinal number 3 (three), 4th (fourth) sounding like 4 (four), 10th (tenth) sounding like 10 (ten), 117th (one-hundred seventeenth) sounding like 117 (one-hundred seventeen), etc. However, 1st (first) and 2nd (second) sound unfamiliar to their cardinal counterparts 1 (one) and 2 (two). This is because these two ordinal numbers were derived from different roots, with "first" being derived from the

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...

root meaning "forward", and "second" deriving from the Latin word "secundus", meaning "following". The phenomenon of ordinal numbers being collateral adjectives of cardinal numbers is common in the Sinospheric languages, including

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

, and

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

. For example, Japanese usually use Sino-Japanese numerals (words for numbers based on the Chinese language) for

measure words In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun. Description Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns ...

that use ordinal numbers. Since Japanese, much like Chinese, doesn't have any inflections that indicate

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

, it uses measure words alongside a number to determine amounts of things. The numerals 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10 usually use the pronunciation derived from Chinese (

on'yomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

), i.e. ''ichi, ni, san, go, roku, hachi, kyū,'' and ''jū'' respectively. However, 4 can be pronounced using either its on'yomi ''shi'' or its native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi) ''yon'', depending on context, and likewise 7 can be pronounced either ''shichi'' or ''nana'', depending on context. Most measure words require the speaker to use the Sino-Japanese on'yomi numbers, e.g. 3 years is ''sannenkan'' (3年間), 6 o'clock is ''rokuji'' (6時), 9 dogs is ''kyūhiki no inu'' (9匹の犬), 7 people is ''shichinin'' (7人), and 4 seasons is ''shiki'' (四季). However, there are some measure words (and even a select few numbers among certain measure words) that require the native kun'yomi numbers: 7 minutes is ''nanafun'' (7分), 4 apples is ''yonko no ringo'' (4個のリンゴ). Measure words that use native numbers include days of the month and ''tsu'', which is the generic measure word that roughly translates into "things". 1–10 are ''hitotsu'' (1つ)'', futatsu'' (2つ)'', mittsu'' (3つ), ''yottsu'' (4つ), ''itsutsu'' (5つ), ''muttsu'' (6つ), ''nanatsu'' (7つ), ''yattsu'' (8つ), ''kokonotsu'' (9つ)'', and tō'' (10). While the measure word for people, ''nin'' (人), usually uses Sino-Japanese numbers, such as ''sannin'' (3人), ''hachinin'' (8人), and ''jūnin'' (10人), the measures for 1 and 2 people use the native numbers, which are ''hitori'' (1人) and ''futari'' (2人).

Attributive In grammar, an attributive expression is a word or phrase within a noun phrase that modifies the head noun. It may be an: * attributive adjective * attributive noun * attributive verb or other part of speech, such as an attributive numeral. ...

usage of a collateral adjective is generally similar in meaning to attributive use of the corresponding noun. For example, ''lunar rocket'' and ''moon rocket'' are accepted as synonyms, as are ''thermal capacity'' and ''heat capacity''. However, in other cases the two words may have

lexicalized In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon. Whether '' word formation'' and ''lexicalization'' refer to the same process is controversial within the field of linguistics. M ...

uses so that one cannot replace the other, as in ''nocturnal view'' and ''night view'', or ''feline grace'' but ''cat food'' (not *''cat grace'' or *''feline food''). Collateral adjectives contrast with derived (denominal) adjectives. For the noun ''father'', for example, there is a derived adjective ''fatherly'' in addition to the collateral adjective ''paternal.'' Similarly, for the noun ''rain'' there is derived ''rainy'' and collateral ''pluvial,'' and for ''child'' there are derived ''childish'' and ''childlike'' as well as collateral ''infantile'' and ''puerile.'' The term "collateral adjective" was coined by the ''

Funk and Wagnalls Funk & Wagnalls was an American publisher known for its reference works, including ''A Standard Dictionary of the English Language'' (1st ed. 1893–5), and the ''Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia'' (25 volumes, 1st ed. 1912).Funk & Wagnalls N ...

'' dictionaries, but as they are currently out of print, the term has become rare. A synonym sometimes seen in linguistics is ''

suppletive In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even ...

(denominal) adjective,'' though this is a liberal and arguably incorrect use of the word 'suppletive'.

References

*''Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary'' (1984) Harper and Row *G. Jan Wilms, "Computerizing a Machine Readable Dictionary", in ''Proceedings of the 28th annual CMSoutheast regional conference,'' 1990 *Tetsuya Koshiishi, "Collateral adjectives, Latinate vocabulary, and English morphology", in ''Studia Anglica Posnaniensia,'' January 2002. *"The typology of suppletion", a chapter in David Beck (2006) ''Aspects of the theory of morphology''

External links

''A Nocturnal View of the Lunar Landscape''
Verbatim: The Language Quarterly {{lexical categories, state=collapsed Parts of speech

See also

References

External links