Potentially silly question, but...

...when turning adjectives into nouns (as I assume would be the correct order), is there a logic as to which suffix is used? Would it just depend on the language from which the word derived, or is it another example of there being in English an exception to every rule, and a 'but' to every exception?

It usually depends on the language of origin of the adjective: kind > kindness, English; bogus > bogosity, Pseudo-Neo-Latin. Not sure what you mean by "correct order". You should be able to turn any part of speech into another. Some faves of mine: quidditas 'whatness', St Thomas Aquinas; ism, noun from borrowed suffix; book > bookish, bookie, bookly, bookness, etc. Language is strong and malleable enough to survive any sort of mangling.

There are many strange artifacts in English similar to this Cat. For example, I was rereading a Stephen Pinker book, and he notes that, "I shook it up" is correct, and "I vibrated it up" isn't, even though the two words here should roughly be the same.

I'm not sure how the brain works this out, but it does. For example, the French gender system may seem complicated, but if you invent a new noun, almost every French speaker will give it the same gender.

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if you invent a new noun, almost every French speaker will give it the same gender.

Wow - that's pretty incredible. Something to do with the collective unconscious, maybe?

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collective unconscious, maybe

Probably has more to do with the coherency of the structure of their language. Works in languages other than French, too, e.g., Russian.

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For example, the French gender system may seem complicated, but if you invent a new noun, almost every French speaker will give it the same gender.

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe. There's no system to the gender of French nouns that I'm aware of.

Honestly, I'm not sure of the source of that, I'll have to try and track it down. From what I understand, things sometimes have an underlying pattern which our brains have learned, but we don't know it explicitly, i.e., the ness/osity thing, given that very few know the actual language of origin for the words.

Maybe it wasn't French but another language with a complicated gender system. I was read something which mentioned French the other day, so maybe I crossed them up.

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Do you have a source for this?

Let's see. Greville Corbett's Gender, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, is a good place to start. In chapter 3, Gender Assignment II; Formal Systems, he cites:

E. Bidot. 1925. La clef du genre des substantifs français.

I. A. Mel'čuk. 1958 [1974]. Statistika i zavisimost' roda francuzskix suščestvitel'nyx ot ix okončanija. Bjulleten' ob''edinenija po problemam mašinnogo perevoda. English version: Statistics and the relationship between the gender of French nouns and their endings, in V. Ju. Rozencvejg (ed.), 1974, Essays on Lexical Semantics, I.11-42.

G R Tucker, W E Lambert, and A A Rigault. 1977. The French Speaker's Skill with Grammatical Gender: An Example of Rule-governed Behavior.

S Poplack, D Sankoff, and C Miller. 1988. The social correlates and lexical processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. In Linguistics 26.47-104.

I think I have the Mel'čuk piece. I'll look for it and see if it cites further works.

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Originally posted by Cat:

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if you invent a new noun, almost every French speaker will give it the same gender.

Wow - that's pretty incredible. Something to do with the collective unconscious, maybe?

Not so much Jung as Chomsky, with his concept of "deep grammar," I suspect. We have an innate sense of grammatical order.

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I'm not sure how the brain works this out, but it does. For example, the French gender system may seem complicated, but if you invent a new noun, almost every French speaker will give it the same gender.

I'm not sure how the French gender system works either. I've come unstuck on that more than once.

The German gender system is very strange too. They do have a Neuter gender, but some things which would seem to be definitely one gender or another take the "wrong" gender, which is very confusing at times.

This is a very interesting article.

In the case of English deadjectivals (derivatives from adjectives), '-ness' is the only freely productive affix, that is the one that can unthinkingly be used on any new word, or any word that doesn't have any established vocabulary item: yukness, interestingness, bloatedness.

The others are limited to existing words, or to small patterns of analogy. Some are entirely dead: maidenhead and godhead don't license any new words. Others can pick up new words in their semantic domain: friendship, companionship; brotherhood, siblinghood.

Those are the native English endings. The Latin endings usually go by formal analogy, because we have familiar established pairs: electric, electricity; porous, porosity. But still I'd be more inclined to reach for hygienicness, pedanticness than hygienicity, pedanticity; and of course both these have existing nouns that don't form a pattern.

In summary: we have a number of familiar patterns that can be used to form words by analogy, but the productive '-ness' is always available to override these.

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Originally posted by Cat:
Potentially silly question, but...

...when turning adjectives into nouns (as I assume would be the correct order), is there a logic as to which suffix is used? Would it just depend on the language from which the word derived, or is it another example of there being in English an exception to every rule, and a 'but' to every exception?

These extremely interesting sites contain hundreds of examples of prefixes and suffixes, with their meanings and usages (and many other things besides):

One

Two

Three

As to gender in languages like French, it might look arbitrary to a foreign adult learner, but the native child just takes it in as raw data: le soleil and la lune are arbitrary, but so are soleil and lune.

The child already knows these by the time it starts trying to generalize to rules. Sometimes it can form a pervasive generalization: male beings are of masculine gender. Other times the rule may be restricted in application: English kin terms have abstracts in '-hood', so even though we've never encountered 'unclehood' we can create it as an adult if we need to.

One new theory, which I find very persuasive, is that there aren't rules and exceptions, there isn't a core of regular grammar and a periphery of odds and ends: rather, there are patterns all the way down. A high-level pattern may apply to all male beings, while others apply to less and less words, until you get grammatical effects that apply to only a single term: like 'had better' or 'didn't used to', or 'police' (you can say the army is/are doing something but the police only are doing it).

So (back to the point) in a gendered language there will be all sorts of patterns the child learns at an early age to enable them to make the right analogy.

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One new theory

A name? An article? Thanks, aput.

What puzzles me is the level of male dominance in many languages. Men are in one noun class, women are in another, usually inferior class, and not in the feminine gender, as in German and the various Australian languages. Long-standing linguistic chauvinism!

What puzzles me is how the gender systems of different languages can be considered to have dominant genders and inferior ones? Most gender systems do not have much to do with biological sex. (von Humboldt, Madvig.) One, old theory is that the feminine gender in Indo-European languages developed out of plurals of the inanimate gender in Proto-Indo-European. (Johannes Schmidt.)

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Potentially silly question, but...

How wrong you were, Cat! This has been one of them best linguistic discussions we've had in awhile. I've enjoyed reading it, but I can't make much of a contribution to the discussion, unfortunately.

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deadjectivals

I haven't heard that word before, and it isn't in Onelook. I did find it in the OED with this citation: 1934 PRIEBSCH & COLLINSON German Lang. iii. 225 De-adjectival verbs like füllen from voll, heilen from heil. 1962 B. M. H. STRANG Mod. Eng. Structure vi. 97 Words that I shall call de-adjectival class nouns..are homonymous with adjectives.

Aput, you say that de-adjectival means "derivatives from adjectives." That doesn't seem to jive with what the OED says, unless I am not understanding what they mean. Your definition was quite clear, but theirs was foggy, at best, to us mere linguistic mortals!

Kalleh, did you mean to say, "jibe," or did you really mean to say, "jive?" I'm cornfoosed! (What's new!)

Deadjectival nouns are nouns derived from adjectives. Deadjectival verbs are verbs derived from adjectives. The OED citation from 1934 seems spot on. Voll and heil are both German adjectives meaning 'full' and 'hale'. Red, in the sense of communist, would be a deadjectival noun which is homonymous with its adjective.

I glossed 'deadjectival' because it's a fairly new term to me, not a traditional grammatical term. Most languages (I suppose) have ways of converting the three main classes N, V, A into each other, and these 'de-' words are names for classifying them:

sugary, waspish: denominal adjectives
bejewel, entomb: denominal verbs
neaten, embitter: deadjectival verbs
arrival, molestation: deverbal nouns
reliable, reliant: deverbal adjectives

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I think I have the Mel'čuk piece. I'll look for it and see if it cites further works.

No, I don't. It was another book by Rozencvejg, Machine translation and applied linguistics, 1974. Sorry about that.

You're right, Kalleh - this is a fascinating discussion. I've enjoyed it.

All I have to add is that my favorite suffix for changing words is -apaloosa, as in "I was so tired, I staged my own yawnapaloosa." I guess it changes it from a verb to a noun . . . so it would be a deverbal noun?

Interesting word this lollapaloosa. Going back at least to 1904. Meaning a remarkable thing or person. It's in the OED. Since its origin is unknown, it is hard to say what its structure is. The use of -paloosa as a kind of suffix is similar to the use of -(o)rama from panorama (fr. pan 'all + horama 'site), coined by Scottish painter, Robert Barker in 1792. That word led to a whole slew of other ones: e.g., cyclorama, futurama, cinerama.

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Kalleh, did you mean to say, "jibe," or did you really mean to say, "jive?"

Yes, yes...sorry! One thing about a word board is that you just can't get away with anything! Even if people don't mention it, you can be sure that they've noticed it!

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The OED citation from 1934 seems spot on. Voll and heil are both German adjectives meaning 'full' and 'hale'. Red, in the sense of communist, would be a deadjectival noun which is homonymous with its adjective.

Zmj, the part I didn't get was "homonymous." I see how that works with "red." But how does it work with "kind" and "kindness?" Or is that not a deadjectival noun? I really am sorry to be so dense about all of this.

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The Daily Show did a bit with the scandalous suffic "gate", implying it went back for quite some time before Watergate, including "Teapot Domegate". Pretty hilarious stuff.

Or Homer, from the Simpsons, on not wanting to go to a Museum, "Everything that ends in -eum is boring, I like things that end in -mania, or -teria".

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the part I didn't get was "homonymous." I see how that works with "red." But how does it work with "kind" and "kindness?"

Not all deadjectival nouns are homonymous with their adjectives. But some adjectives getted turned into nouns without any affixation. Latin was very good at this.

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with the scandalous suffic "gate"

It's interesting in the case of Watergate, that the -gate is really just another word in compound. Whether it originally meant gate as in an entrance in a wall or small street (related to German Gasse) seems to be open to debate. Probably a bit of both.

[Fixed a typo.]

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It seems to me that a watergate would be a lock in a canal. Maybe I'm being too logical.

I've been dyslexic since childhood, but it was exacerbated by a brain injury in 1991. As a result, when I saw the word, "deadjectival," I thought it referred to throwing corpses. (dead-jectival) I have a similar problem with the lack of hyphenation in the USA. For example, I see "coworker" as "cow orker." Maybe it's not dyslexia exactly, but a sign of a vegetative mind (parse-nipping)

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It seems to me that a watergate would be a lock in a canal. Maybe I'm being too logical.

In this case you are right. According to the article on the Watergate Hotel in the Wikipedia:

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The Watergate complex was developed by the Italian firm Societa Generale Immobiliare, which purchased the plot of land on the defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in the early 1960s. The last lock, which diverted water from the Potomac River into the Tidal Basin at flood tide, was known as the "water gate." Italian architect Luigi Moretti designed the six buildings on the site: a hotel, two office buildings, three apartment buildings and a retail center.

So, sometimes logic and etymology come together.