[00:22:56] I heard a linguist friend of mine saying that in English in particular whether a word is an adjective or a noun is more a function of how it is used as a token and less an inherent feature of its type [05:32:07] right... they also never hesitate to use a noun as a verb [07:44:11] This is true in many (maybe most) languages which have adjectives, as an adjective can be used to refer to an an entity having its quality. In general, one can define part-of-speech categories either using word-internal (e.g. morphological or semantic) properties, or external properties (syntactic distribution), and for a specific word these do not always match. (re @vrandecic: I heard a linguist friend of mine saying that i [08:11:30] german also uses different forms depending on whether it's an attribute or predicate. I would expect the predicative form to be intended most of the time in translations [08:11:47] but interestingly you need the attributive forms if you want to use it as a noun [08:29:57] I also find it interesting that you can use an adjective to mean one specific entity with that quality in german, but that doesn't really work in english, like if you're asked which one you like, you can say something like "die kleine" but in english it's "the small one" and (to me at least) "the small" doesn't really work for that, at best there's an implied "one" after it [09:00:36] It's true that English is more strict than most languages in limiting stand-alone use of adjectives as nouns, but it does happen also in English as the drift from certain adjectives (such as "built-in" discussed above) to nouns shows. Moreover, in certain contexts it may be more acceptable, for instance a sentence like "the old teach the young". [14:59:45] But in "the old teach the young" it would not refer to a specific old and young entity, but rather to the group of old and young entities [15:01:12] The same would be true in "The Bold and the Beautiful", but not in "The Beauty and the Beast". The Beauty works, the Beautiful doesn't [15:02:46] That's true. This relates to the fact that English adjectives don't inflect for number (contrary, say, to German) so they are ambiguous when they appear without an explicit noun (though the verb disambiguates in the example I've given). [15:04:58] I agree that it is more difficult in English to use a stand-alone adjective with a singular sense, unless it has been conventionally changed to be a noun. [15:08:01] Maybe these two facts are related though; that is, since English adjectives don't inflect for number, whenever they are used without nouns maybe conventionally they are understood as plurals (specifically when referring to people). This probably needs some linguistic investigation to ascertain... [17:34:45] Some related whimsy 😊 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 (re @komarov_info: right... they also never hesitate to use a noun as a verb) [17:40:37] heh… re the last panel, “weird” has been a verb for a long time ;) https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-2