Talk:terracotta

terracotta
Adjective: "made of terracotta". Is this really a separate sense? --Yair rand 22:08, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Not if I may decide. --Hekaheka 05:39, 15 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Let's try what Ruakh has suggested before, and use empirical evidence to decide (on RFD, without resorting to RFV unless we have to). I've looked for modification by the adverb "very", one test, but Google Books only has examples like "Unmistakably, she is the same nude who appears on Old Babylonian cylinder seals often as an object, a figurine or the very terracotta plaque just described" (2006, Silvia Schroer, Images and Gender: contributions to the hermeneutics of reading, page 196), in which very is an adjective and terracotta is most plausibly a noun. Next I looked for modification by "too", but that, too, only turned up examples like "Here too, terracotta hearths and floor-levels were found" (1999 Robert Leighton, Sicily Before History, page 120). "Terracottaer" and "terracottaest" are not English words. Google Books has one example of "the most terracotta", but I think it's a scanno. Use with forms of "become" is more promising:
 * 2011 February-March, Dan Cooper, Arts & Crafts Walls, in the Old-House Journal, volume 39, number 1, page 24:
 * The designers softened them by selecting tertiary colors, so that green became olive, red became terracotta, yellow became ochre, and so on.
 * 1996, Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column, page 352:
 * [...] when it became terracotta and stone; [...]
 * The second quotation might still be use of the noun. The first quotation suggests a way of finding an adjective "terracotta" (though one meaning "terracotta-coloured", not "made of terracotta"): look for collocation with other colours.
 * 2006, Elizabeth Moore, Than Swe, Early Walled Sties of Dawei, in Uncovering Southeast Asia's Past: selected papers from the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, page 290:
 * They are deep red or terracotta, yellow brown, milk white, cream, sky blue and dark blue in colour.
 * Thus, I think the existing adjective should be deleted, but I will add the attested adjective. - -sche (discuss) 21:58, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I have had similar experience in looking at noun-derived color adjectives. Only the rarest of color nouns are not also attestably adjectives in my experience. DCDuring TALK 23:12, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Striking. Deleted disputed sense due to absence of defenders. --Hekaheka 23:01, 28 November 2011 (UTC)