I was told last night that my home language has a 1st Person Dual!? WTF is that? And it turns out I’m using the word intuitively without question. We also have 1st Person Plural Inclusive and 1st Person Plural Exclusive. Again, I wasn’t aware but have been using the words like it was nothing.
Grammatical Persons
Grammatical Persons
Word
Nearest English
1st Person Singular
iyaku/yaku
1st Person Dual
ikata
You and I
1st Person Plural Inclusive
ikatamu / itamu
1st Person Plural Exclusive
ikami
Us, but not you haha
2nd Person Singular
ika
2nd Person Plural
ikayu
y’all
3rd Person Singular
iya
he/she as it’s gender neutral
3rd Person Plural
ila
Possessive form are the same but with a k/ke- prefix, instead of i-. It now make sense when I emphasises the word ours in English to express 1st Person Dual, because the word doesn’t exists in English, but want to express it.
‘New Zealander’ is a noun. “I am a New Zealander” makes grammatical sense, “I am New Zealander” doesn’t follow the rules of English. For all that it’s perfectly understandable, it is something that only a non-native speaker would say.
I believe your belief that ‘New Zealander’ can function as an English adjective is incorrect!
I know it’s a noun. But lots of nouns are adjectives.
And if the context helps, I am as native a speaker of English as anyone could be—I wasn’t actually speaking it when I was born, but I did start pretty early on.
An American colleague once told me that they consider “y’all” to be the 2nd Person Singular, and that the correct 2nd Person Plural is “all y’all”. To this day I’m genuinely not sure how serious they were being, but I don’t think they were entirely joking.
Maybe it needs to be “New Zealandian” instead. Same way “I am American” or “I am Canadian” is just the same as saying “I am an American” or “I am a Canadian”. “New Zealander” sounds wrong because of the “-er” ending, while “I am New Zealandian” works fine.
Y’all is an indefinite plural. It’s probably plural, but it might be referring to a singular person. All y’all is definitely plural. The big difference is plain y’all can refer to a subset of the group being addressed, while all y’all certainly includes the whole group. “Y’all get off my lawn!” yelled at a group on the lawn might not include your cousin, but just the riff raff with her, for instance. You could also yell that without knowing how many people are on your lawn. Racking the slide of a shotgun immediately after is entirely optional.
You can also tell a single individual “all y’all come over for supper.”, meaning ‘bring your family’ (or some other group, probably obvious from context.).
I guess I’m not expressing myself clearly. I thought you were asking for justification of my claim that lots of nouns are adjectives. I gave you the two examples of classes of words that have noun and adjective roles that I could remember off-hand. To my mind, these by themselves constitute “lots”.
(I reject any kind of claim about a word’s ‘essential part of speech’. That’s why I’m talking about ‘roles’. I’m not saying you’re making such a claim, but this is related to a claim I’m about to make, so I mention it.)
We both agree that ‘New Zealander’ can be used as a noun. I’m saying I don’t see why it can’t also be used as an adjective. (It seems to me that it fits the correct language niche to be used for that purpose, and, no, I don’t think ending in ‘-er’ makes that less likely.) English has a long habit of using words that have usage as nouns also as adjectives (see above), and we’ve described a clear need for an adjective which has a particular meaning related to the meaning of this noun. We could certainly tack on endings to get ‘New Zealandic’ or ‘New Zealandish’, but I think part of the point of this conversation has been that those sound silly and that there’s no clear form to prefer. I’m saying that in that situation, ‘New Zealander’ is a strong choice: unlike a lot of the other variants, it’s already well-attested as an English word, it has a related usage, it would rarely be confused with that other usage, and it doesn’t sound any more silly than the other suggestions. Since English is not a language in which words with noun usage cannot have adjectival usage, there’s no impediment. And this gets to the final point—usage defines the language, so saying, “I haven’t used this word (or even ‘a word’) this way before,” cannot be a valid impediment in a discussion of use. The word has the potential to be used this way, so the only question that remains is whether people will use it this way. I think I have a set of reasonable arguments why people might want to use ‘New Zealander’ adjectively.
I’m sure there’s plenty of analysis that could be done for origin adjectives for York vs. New York, Jersey vs. New Jersey, Egypt vs. New Egypt, Zealand vs. New Zealand, etc.
My knowledge of New Jersey has increased substantially today!
If I ever find myself in the area, is New Egypt worth a visit? I suspect the answer might be no - fulsome apologies to all New Egyptians if the answer is in fact yes.
You certainly don’t hear that much nowadays. I’m old enough to be familiar with it, but I’ve no idea whether the kids these days know it. Mum sometimes used it, as it was the name she was familiar with growing up.
It’s just that awkward artifact - United States of Mexico, United States of Brasil, United States of America. Everyone else just goes by the the non-ambiguous identifier (officially now, in Brasil). We have to keep the “US” part around to distinguish from the continents. But it makes us harder to pin down than the Mexicans.
(now I’m a little curious, looks like Columbia and Venezuela also used to be the United States but Columbia dropped the prefix over 100 years ago.)
