Talk:crown

Is crown really an adjective in "crown prince"? It doesn't pass any of the usual tests for deciding whether a modifier is an adjective or a noun yet it does "feel" a bit more like one than most of the questionable ones I've pointed out before. Opinions? &mdash; Hippietrail 00:27, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * If it is not an adjective, then what is the adjective? English is a funky language. In other languages there clearly are indisputable adjectives, e.g. the Slovak korunný, [korunná]], korunné. So how do you tell in a dictionary that a word is an adjective in one language but not in another??? Crown prince in Slovak is korunný princ, where korunný is most definitely an adjective. As long as an English word functions as an adjective, then it should be an adjective, shouldn't it. --Red Prince 00:35, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Not at all, in English nouns can just as well function as adjectives in their most simple sense, but only adjectives function in all the other senses. We shouldn't dumb down the term "adjective" to something more general when we already have general terms such as "modifier". All adjectives are modifiers but not all modifiers are adjectives. Here are some things most adjectives can do which noun modifiers cannot (asterisks mark utterances which nobody would say):
 * The big old prince
 * The crown old prince*
 * Which prince? The big one.
 * Which prince? The crown one.*
 * The bigger prince
 * The crowner prince*
 * That prince is big
 * That prince is crown*


 * Now it is tricky when the translation of a word into a different language is a different part of speech but that doesn't mean we should contort the grammar of the source language to fit the grammar of the second language. The best we can do is note in the translation section that it's an adjective in this sense in this language.


 * Having said all this, some adjectives don't pass some of the tests above. (Unfortunately I can't think of one off the top of my head). Sometimes a native speaker can detect the "feel" of a word. In this case "crown" "feels" a bit more like an adjective than some other words to me at least... &mdash; Hippietrail 00:52, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree, "crown" is not an adjective here... crown prince is a compound word (cf. German Kronprinz), where crown is a noun acting as a determiner. —Muke Tever 05:03, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The word absolute does not pass all those tests. Absolute price, yes. Absoluter prince, no. :) Anyway, English is not my language. If you feel it is not an adjective, then please change it, just please make sure we have a way of showing the English->non-English when the non-English is an adjective and the English is not. --Red Prince 01:11, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

RFD discussion: January–April 2020

 * See Talk:unicorn.

RFV discussion: December 2021–January 2022
Rfv-sense: The bights formed by the turns of a cable. Notusbutthem (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Couldn't find it in Hamersly's Naval Encyclopedia (1880). DCDuring (talk) 19:58, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
 * It's supposed to be in plural. MW 1913 from which our definition is copied refers to its source as "Totten', presumably Naval Text-book: Letters to the Midshipmen of the United States Navy on Masting, Rigging, and Managing Vessels of War, Benjamin J. Totten, 1841. That work contains no use of crowns. All uses of crown are in reference to anchors. I could not find another edition of this work. I could not find crown or crowns co-occurring with bight or bights.
 * Could this be related somehow to the crown knot used to prevent the unraveling of a rope or cable? DCDuring (talk) 21:02, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 20:48, 5 January 2022 (UTC)