An utterly pointless question, unless you have
criteria for assigning words to "parts of speech,"
and you don't. No one does. Things that go X Xes
X's Xes' are nouns, X Xs Xed Xing Xen are verbs,
and X Xer Xest are adjectives;
Wrong. Those are only properties of the noun, the
verb, and the adjective. Their definitions are more
fundamental and therefore useful:
+--------------------------------------------------+
| Goold Brown John Nesfield |
| |
|A Noun is the name of A noun is a word used |
|any person, place, or for naming anything. |
|thing, that can be |
|known or mentioned. |
| |
|A Verb is a word that A verb is a word used |
|signifies to be, to for saying something |
|act, or to be acted up- about something else. |
|on |
| |
|An Adjective is a word A word that enlarges |
|added to a noun or pro- the meaning and narrows |
|noun, and generally ex- the application of a |
|presses quality. noun |
+--------------------------------------------------+
You probably need Nesfield's explanations the better
to understand his definitions, but I will not retype
them here. I should, however, like to draw your at-
tention to Nesfiled's mathematically beautiful
defintion of the adjective. Think of it in terms of
information theory or set theory: the more criteria
we supply the fewer become the objects to which they
apply. For example, there are more houses than red
houses.
but an awful lot of words don't fall into any of
those inflection patterns and so can't be assigned
even to that not-too-useful scheme.
Because English has lost, or never had, a complete
and regular system of inflecions. This is another
reason not to rely on them and to preserve what are
still with us, e.g. `whom'.
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