Today I came across these definitions of "forty" in the Quick definitions box of Onelook.
noun: the cardinal number that is the product of four and ten adjective: being ten more than thirty
A number of things about it caught my eye. First there is the obvious question of why, apart from perhaps a needless quest for variety, they have given a "noun" definition in terms of a product but an "adjective" definition in terms of a sum. The definitions are also temptingly circular. "Thirty - being ten less then forty". They seem to me to actually tell you very little.
However that was the least of my ponderings. When I thought about it further that I realised I could also question this use of "noun" and "adjective" because I'm not sure that "forty" - or indeed any other number - should properly be defined as either. Let's consider the noun usage. There are usages that are nouns and some that look as if they are nouns - "Yesterday I saw The 300", "He's in the first eleven", "I was one of the ten who went to the party", "She's the one for me." It's easy enough to come up with examples but how many of these are actually noun usages? "He's in the first eleven" probably qualifies but this is a special usage. In this usage the word means "a team with eleven members". It's a highly specialised sports usage and arguably falls into the group that also includes "The 300" and "one of the ten" which is technically an ellipsis. "The 300" really means "The 300 Spartans", "one of the ten" (here) means "one of the ten people" and arguably "the first eleven" means "the first eleven members of the team". These are not nouns - the noun is actually omitted. They are at best elliptical hints at what the missing noun should be. "She's the one for me" is probably the most likely candidate for noun status because "The one" is conventionally used to mean "the single example". It's still potentially an ellipsis but at least it functions grammatically as a noun.
I'm even less convinced by the description of numbers as "adjectives". Yes it sits in the same place in the sentence.
big cars red cars expensive cars forty cars
or
shiny people happy people twenty people
It's doing a different job though. Adjectives describe qualities of a noun - bigness, redness, expensiveness, shininess, happiness... but fortyiness, twentiness? I don't think so! (And neither does Word, which just underlined them in helpful red for me.)
Functionally they work in the same way as "the", "a", "these", "those", "some". "The one", "the forty", "the few", "the many", "the 300".
They are not, I'd contend, adjectives at all, they are determiners. Or do other people, with more heavyweight language credentials than I, disagree?
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
That's pretty much how I'd classify cardinal numbers in English. In some inflected languages they look more like adjectives, but that's hardly a reason to call them adjectives.
Many and few are definitely NOT adjectives. They are determiners, just like "the", "a", "these", "those" etc. Which is what I'd say the cardinal numbers are too.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
Originally posted by BobHale: Many and few are definitely NOT adjectives. They are determiners, just like "the", "a", "these", "those" etc. Which is what I'd say the cardinal numbers are too.
