this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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Lots of modern English words came from French, especially Norman French.
These modern English phrases that follow this “noun then adjective” are French loan phrases (I think). Or, they were constructed to look like French loans, because French was the language of the nobility, a “higher” way of speaking than dirty, peasant English.
I thought the overwhelming majority of English words have Latin roots? That's what I was always taught in Latin classes
Well … yes, but a lot of them went Latin > French > English.
I still don't really understand how that pertains to why the plural -s goes with the noun in fixed phrases like attorney general
Because English doesn't pluralize adjectives. English is a mutt of a language, and it doesn't always make sense.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's just what English does, and I don't see what it has to do with french.
These phrases are heavily influenced by French, even if they don't follow all of the exact same rules. "Not pluralizing adjectives" is a more ingrained rule of English than "adjectives come before nouns," so with these phrases, the latter rule is set aside in favor of "Frenchness" while the former rule remains in place.
The messiness of English is directly because of all the different influences from other peoples and their languages over the centuries; it's not "just what English does" without reason.