(I wrote the following post almost completely linearly. I barely went back and changed anything. Please forgive me for how bad the writing is, and for how rough a lot of the explanations are.)
Nouns are correlatives to adjectives, so I will have to explain both of them to explain one of them. Most people come up with ad hoc, disjointed, and unsystematic definitions of nouns and adjectives, such as saying that nouns refer to “time-stable” ideas and adjectives to “non-time-stable” ideas, but I think that those qualties are just the offshoots of a more fundamental distinction. (Also, a lot of people just say things like, look, nouns can have the possessive “s” put onto them, so that is what a noun is, something which can take the possessive “s”! But I don’t think that is much of a definition. It is just an indicator that relies on having defined the other things in the language already.)
Nouns and adjectives are probably the easiest distinction to make, because they don’t rely on any other distinctions besides those that you need to start out with the simplest language possible anyway. So I will start out with the simplest language possible, and then build nouns and adjectives into it, which will give you an idea of what the point of the distinction is, and then I will show you how the distinction is mostly pointless in English, because of its word order, but that it is necessary sometimes.
We need to start out with the distinction into objects and relations. I’m not talking about any distinction that exists only in languages, but a distinction that exists in every thought that we have. The distinction into objects and relations is a fundamental distinction of in our mind. We can’t think without it. So the distinction is pretty obvious. When I think of the desk in my room that I am sitting at, I am thinking of a relation between two objects, the fact that my desk is related to my room by being in it. The desk is in my room. That is a relation between two objects. But what is less obvious is that objects like my desk are themselves just a compilation of objects and relations. The legs of my desk are below its surface. The left-hand side of its surface is to the left of the right-hand side. And so on.
We are now with that distinction ready to build the template of a very simple language, and then I will show you how to add the distinction between nouns and adjectives into it. I will use context-free grammar to build it, because that is one of the easiest and most familiar formal languages, but I could use a bunch of different ones, my own, or whatever.
So, where “C” is the start symbol, and the word order of the language that I am builditg with it is prefix notation, “R” is for “relation”, and “O” is for “object”, here are the formation rules for the language:
- O → a | b | c | …
- R → α | ß | Γ | …
- C → R O O | R C C | R C O | R O C
We can with those formation rules build any combination of relations of objects that we want. The “a”, “b”, “c”, and so on are just random relations, and the “α”, “ß”, “Γ”, and so on are just random objects. We haven’t yet given any interpretations to anything besides that one group is a group of relations and the other is a group of objects. I will just give you a few examples of what we could do with that language. We start out with the start symbol and then just start substituting things for it based on the formation rules.
The first example:
- C
- R C C
- R R O O R C O
- R R O O R R O O O
- α Γ a b α Γ c c a
The second example:
- C
- R O O
- Γ a b
And the third example:
- R C O
- R R O O O
- Γ Γ a c b
One thing about this is that it would probably be a lot easier to read if you put paratheses around the things that you could simplify. We can simplify any set of a relation and two objects into just an object, like the fact that we can simply the relation between the legs of my desk and the surface of my desk just into the desk. So I will give you an example that will be easier to understand by using the paratheses and substituting English words for the letters.
Remember the third example:
- R C O
- R R O O O
- Γ Γ a c b
Here it is with paratheses:
- R C O
- R (R O O) O
- Γ (Γ a c) b
Now here it is with English words:
- R C O
- R (R O O) O
- shot (in somebody germany) i
So that would mean something like this: I shot somebody in Germany. If we had a word that just meant “somebody in Germany”, I could replace “somebody in Germany” with it and be simplify a relation between two objects into just an object.
So far the only thing that I have done is introduced the distinction into objects and relations, which is one that we find in our own private world, which is one that is required for all of our thoughts, and just represented it in a set of formation rules. I am just creating a model of a very simple part of my private world. Now I will show you how to make the distinction between nouns and adjectives, and show you why it is just a convenience of our language, and not really anything fundamental about our thought process, but how it comes out of making an easier to use version of the model of that simple part of our mind. I will be following natural languages, but only because what I am trying to do is make a model of something that happens in natural languages. I am using information from natural languages only because what I am interested in right now is explaining something about natural languages. (That should sound very familiar, if you remember what Ludwig von Mises talked about in chapter two of Human Action.)
I need to add one more thing before I do this. I need to define what intersection is. Intersection is basically just comparing ideas in your mind and finding out what is common between both of them. A more exact definition of it in terms of extension and sets would be this:
- The “intersection” of any two sets A and B is the set of the elements included in both A and B. So, for example, the intersection of the sets {1, 2, 3} and {2, 3, 4} is the set {2, 3}.
Now I am ready.
The symbol for the operation of intersection in some phrases of English is “null”, is invisible; for instance, in the phrase “faint likeness”, it is clear that, though no symbol explicitly refers to it, the relationship between its parts, “faint” and “likeness” is one of intersection, that, in other words, in refers to things that are at the same time both faint and a likeness.
But here is the problem, and where the distinction into nouns and adjectives comes to rescue us. If I try to change the system that I already came up with to mirror that, if I try to make it so I can symbolize intersection between two objects with an invisible symbol, things get really ambiguous, because whether those symbols exist, and what the placement of them are, is impossible to know.
For example, where the ending “-o” symbols that the words are objects:
- tafo djefto ketfayso
It isn’t clear from that presentation which of the following interpretations apply: (1) that one invisible symbol exists before “tafo”, and therefore take “tafo” and “djefto” as its arguments, leaving two disconnected objects, “tafo djefto” and “detfayso”, (2) that one exists between “tafo” and “djefto”, and therefore takes “djefto” and “ketfayso” as its arguments, leaving two disconnected objects, “tafo” and “djefto” “ketfayso”, (3) that two invisible symbols exist, one before “tafo” and an other between “djefto” and “ketfayso”, and therefore first takes “djefto” and “ketfayso” as its arguments, leaving two disconnected objects, “tafo” and “djefto ketfayso”, and then second takes “tafo” and “djefto ketfayso” as its arguments, leaving only one object, “tafo djefto ketfayso”, or, finally, (4) that they just aren’t there, so all three of the objects remain untouched, leaving three disconnected objects, “tafo”, “djefto”, and “ketfayso”.
That is, it could be any of these four interpretations, where the asterisk makes the intersection explicit.
-
- tafo djefto ketfayso
- tafo * djefto ketfayso
-
- tafo * djefto ketfayso
- tafo djefto ketfayso
In other words, it isn’t clear what the grouping of the words are, (1) whether they are “tafo djefto” and “ketfayso”, (2) whether they are “tafo” and “djefto ketfayso”, (3) whether they are “tafo djefto ketfayso”, or whether they are just “tafo”, “djefto”, and “ketfayso”.
That is, it could be any of these four interpretations, where the paratheses make the groupings explicit.
- (tafo djefto) ketfayso
- tafo (djefto ketfayso)
- (tafo (djefto ketfayso))
- tafo djefto ketfayso
So how do we fix this? How can we have intersection be referred to by an invisible symbol, but know where they are and whether they are even there? Well, if we distinguish between two functions of objects, which we will appropriately name “nouns” and “adjectives”, and establish (1) that nouns begin “simple phrases”, (2) that any number of adjectives may follow it in the phrase, and (3) that nouns and any adjectives succeeding it “blend” together to form an object composed of the intersection of them, the presentation becomes, at once, entirely precise and unambiguous.
In the following set of examples, the endings “-a” symbolize that the word to which it is attached is an object functioning as a noun and “-u” that it is one functioning as an adjective.
First, remember the problem:
- tafo djefto ketfayso
That could mean any of these:
-
- tafo djefto ketfayso
- tafo * djefto ketfayso
-
- tafo * djefto ketfayso
- tafo djefto ketfayso
But now we can with those ending make them explicit but keep the asterisk invisible:
- tafa djetfu ketfaysa
- tafa djetfa ketfaysu
- tafa djeftu ketfaysu
- tafa djefta ketfaysa
So the groupings are these:
- (tafa djetfu) (ketfaysa)
- (tafa) (djetfa ketfaysu)
- (tafa djeftu ketfaysu)
- (tafa) (djefta) (ketfaysa)
But now that I have those endings saying whether the object is being used as a noun or an adjective, the paratheses are redundant, because the endings “-a” and “-u” serve the same purpose.
Now I think that that is the fundamental distinction into nouns and adjectives. I think that English, and most natural languages, didn’t evolve an ending to distinguish them, but tended to have a ridiculously irregular system where just the word itself is either a noun or an adjective. Nothing about the word “stupid” makes it obvious that it is an adjective, and nothing about the word “idiot” makes it obvious that it is a noun; you just need to memorize those things when you learn English.
Now keep in mind that I was using prefix notation for my sample language, but English uses infix notation a lot of the time, so that means that the relation often separates the two objects, and you don’t even need to know whether they are nouns or adjectives. For example, in the sentence “the red tree is in the green forest”, it doesn’t matter whether you know that “red” is an adjective, “tree” is a noun, and so on, because “is in” separates each side, acting like those parentheses that I talked about. But there are situtation where you need it, like when the relation takes three objects, like it “I needed to give someone stupid something important”. We need to know that “someone” is a noun, “stupid” is an adjective, and so on, to know the groupings of those four words, and know that they are “someone stupid” and “something important” instead of for example something like “someone” and “stupid someone important”. But, either way, English probably at some point in its history was either prefix or postfix, and therefore needed the distinction anyway. (Also note that people often don’t heed the distinction and use nouns as adjectives or adjectives as nouns, because the distinction is usually useless, such as in the phrase “hand me a long”, if they are working in a factory where they need to constantly distinguish between the long and short version of a tool or something.)
Now the ad hoc things that people say about nouns and adjectives, such as what I said at the beginning, saying that nouns refer to “time-stable” ideas and adjectives to “non-time-stable” ideas, is just an offshoot of that. Our language formed words and specified in an almost completely irregular fashion whether they are nouns or adjectives, so words that tended to be used as adjectives tended to just end up feeling like adjectives, and those usually used as nouns tended to just end up feeling like nouns. So, if you usually use a word by itself, it will be used as a noun, and will end up just being a noun. But, if you usually use a word with other words, it will often be used as an adjective, and will end up just being an adjective. Now, if something is usually used with other things, that means that it is usually a transient quality of something that is usually permanent. You should see where I am going with this, but it is pretty hard to explain.