Parasynthetic derivative of the week
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Or maybe that should be paraparasynthetic. Charles Belov writes:
From "San Francisco’s Lazy Bear rose out of a recession. Can it survive coronavirus?" by Janelle Bitker: "But now, the chefs serve takeout cold-brew coffee, pastries and sandwiches — like hot Wagyu pastrami on sourdough — that they hope taste worthy of a two Michelin-starred restaurant."
I'm okay with split infinitives but this just seems wrong. I would have expected "Michelin-two-starred restaurant."
I agree that "two Michelin-starred" seems a bit awkward — a fully hyphenated version ("a two-Michelin-starred restaurant") would make the structure clearer. But Charles' preference, "Michelin-two-starred", seems wrong to me.
The morpho-syntactic background here is the process of adding -ed "to nouns in order to form adjectives connoting the possession or the presence of the attribute or thing expressed by the noun", and similarly with modified nouns, "as dark-eyed, seven-hilled, leather-aproned, etc." The OED explains this, in a charmingly old-fashioned way, in its entry for -ed, suffix2 (not updated since 1891) :
Old English -ede = Old Saxon -ôdi (not represented elsewhere in Germanic, though Old Norse had adjectives similarly < nouns, with participial form and i- umlaut, as eygðr eyed, hynrdr horned):—Germanic type –ôđjo-, is appended to nouns in order to form adjectives connoting the possession or the presence of the attribute or thing expressed by the noun. The function of the suffix is thus identical with that of the Latin participial suffix –tus as used in caudātus tailed, aurītus eared, etc.; and it is possible that the Germanic -ôđjo- may originally have been < -ôđo- (see -ed suffix1), the suffix of past participles of verbs in -ôjan formed upon nouns. In modern English, and even in Middle English, the form affords no means of distinguishing between the genuine examples of this suffix and those participial adjectives in -ed suffix1 which are ultimately < nouns through unrecorded verbs. Examples that have come down from Old English are ringed:—Old English hringede, hooked:—Old English hócede, etc. The suffix is now added without restriction to any noun from which it is desired to form an adjective with the sense ‘possessing, provided with, characterized by’ (something); e.g. in toothed, booted, wooded, moneyed, cultured, diseased, jaundiced, etc., and in parasynthetic derivatives, as dark-eyed, seven-hilled, leather-aproned, etc. In bigoted, crabbed, dogged, the suffix has a vaguer meaning. (Groundless objections have been made to the use of such words by writers unfamiliar with the history of the language: see quotes.) In pronunciation this suffix follows the same rules as -ed suffix1.
It's fun to see both Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge caught peeving about this time-honored process:
1779 S. Johnson Gray in Wks. IV. 302 There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives, the termination of participles: such as the ‘cultured’ plain..but I was sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the ‘honied’ spring.
1832 S. T. Coleridge Table-talk (1836) 171 I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented..The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse.
I wonder why their historically unmotivated crotchet didn't catch on, like animus against clause-final prepositions and split infinitives (and even split verbs, in some circles) did. Perhaps it was because Coleridge himself was an enthusiastic user of this same derivational process, as discussed in "More 'screaming and spluttering' from Matthew Engel", 7/21/2011.
For lagniappe, here's the OED on parasynthetic, also from 1891:
Formed from a combination or compound of two or more elements; formed by a process of both compounding and derivation.
In English grammar applied to compounds one of whose elements includes an affix which relates in meaning to the whole compound; e.g. black-eyed ‘having black eyes’ where the suffix of the second element, -ed (denoting ‘having’), applies to the whole, not merely to the second element. In French grammar applied to derived verbs formed by the addition of both a prefix and a suffix.
Anyhow, just as "having black eyes" can be rendered as "black-eyed", so "having two Michelin stars" could be rendered as "two-Michelin-starred". On that model, Charles' "Michelin-two-starred" would correspond to "having Michelin two stars" — but "Michelin two stars" isn't a thing, is it? Or am I missing the point?
Dick Margulis said,
August 15, 2020 @ 7:40 am
If there were Michelin restaurants, some of them could be Michelin two-starred restaurants. But there are not. So I think you are correct.
Philip Taylor said,
August 15, 2020 @ 8:39 am
In British English (and deliberately skipping the difficulty of where to insert the "Michelin"), we would call them "2-star" restaurants (and hotels, etc) rather than "2-starred". After all, Texas is not the "Lone-starred" state, is it ?!
[(myl) But this may be because Texas doesn't exactly have a lone star, in the sense that a "two-headed monster" has two heads — it's the Texas state flag that has the star. Also, we talk about a "five star review" rather than a "five-starred review", maybe because the review is five stars rather than having five stars. It's dangerous to expect morphology to be logically consistent, though.]
And even though Hart (for example) calls for positive integers less than 10 to be spelled out in full, I think that we would usually tend to opt for the numeric form when the number is a qualifier of "star".
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 15, 2020 @ 10:01 am
I lean toward "two-Michelin-starred" myself, but there might be some justification for "Michelin-two-starred" if we interpret it as a sub-species of "Michelin-endorsed".
Tom Dawkes said,
August 15, 2020 @ 11:00 am
Surely you could draw on the example of "the king of Scotland’s daughter" to show how the structure does not depend on the closeness of the elements? Nobody interprets that phrase as meaning that Scotland has a daughter who has a king.
RfP said,
August 15, 2020 @ 11:47 am
I mostly agree with Philip, so “a Michelin two-star restaurant” sounds perfectly natural to me, but it would read more naturally to me with the two spelled out.
And the stars do reflect a review, much like Mark’s “five star review,” but it also seems like the “two-star” is a compound modifier that reads more clearly with a hyphen in this context.
RfP said,
August 15, 2020 @ 12:06 pm
And maybe this is just peevology on my part, but there seems to be a creeping tendency to hyphenate every single, dang-blang modifier in this position these days. I understand the push in that direction, because there are times when it reduces ambiguity? But “Michelin-two-star(red) review” veers too close to clunkiness for my taste.
I thought Mark Twain complained about the awful German language (which I happen to admire :), not the awful Germanic languages!
RfP said,
August 15, 2020 @ 12:07 pm
“ambiguity.”
rosie said,
August 15, 2020 @ 1:04 pm
An Oscar-two-nominated actor or a two-Oscar-nominated actor?
A two-Michelin-star(red) restaurant, definitely. We speak of the stars as separate objects. The restaurant has two Michelin stars; it does not rate 2 on the Michelin scale. Plus what Dick Margulis said.
Alexander Browne said,
August 15, 2020 @ 2:35 pm
@rosie: "Two-Oscar-nominated" is better, but for that phrase at least, I prefer "two-time Oscar-nominated". Google shows about ten times the results for "two time oscar nominated" (302,000) compared with "two oscar nominated" (29,000).
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 15, 2020 @ 2:52 pm
rosie: "The restaurant has two Michelin stars; it does not rate 2 on the Michelin scale."
Sorry, I'm not understanding the distinction you're making. According to Wikipedia, a two-star restaurant does in fact rank two on a scale of zero to three; it's not a two-time winner of one star. So "a Michelin two-star restaurant" doesn't seem any less coherent than (say) "a New York Times bestseller" or "a Billboard Top-40 single".
Jerry Friedman said,
August 15, 2020 @ 4:22 pm
I agree with Gregory Kusnick that "Michelin-two-starred" can be understood by analogy with "Michelin-endorsed". Michelin two-starred the restaurant (and weren't we just doing "three-putted" and the like?). However, I'd have written "worthy of a restaurant with two Michelin stars."
Some how this reminds me of certain hyphenated adjectives in botany. I opened Intermountain Flora, Volume Four, to a random page (306) and found "short-petiolate", having short petioles.
Jen in Edinburgh said,
August 15, 2020 @ 4:26 pm
Twice Oscar nominated.
(Although three-times Oscar nominated, and so on.)
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2020 @ 5:02 pm
Like Philip Taylor, I would have expected "Michelin two star restaurant". Contra rosie, the meaning of the phrase is exactly that the restaurant rates a 2 on the five-point Michelin scale. (unrated/0/1/2/3)
COCA overwhelmingly agrees that the form should be "two star" and not "two starred", though the placement of the word "Michelin" varies.
Those are all of the relevant hits from the top 100 COCA results for "Michelin"; I don't know how to restrict the search to "Michelin, but with a form of the word 'star' nearby". There are a couple other hits of interest:
For the first three, I understand them as referring to a restaurant with any rating of one star or above, not as referring to a particular rating. For that last one, I suspect this is a more polite way of saying that the restaurant was rated zero stars.
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2020 @ 5:03 pm
I have the same reaction as the original complaint: 'Michelin two-star(red)' sounds much better than 'two-Michelin-star(red)', perhaps because a 'Michelin star' isn't a real thing; it's just the unit of a rating system. The latter could also suggest 'twice Michelin-starred', which is wrong here.
Someone nominated to two Oscars (which I believe must by rule be at the same selection, so twice etc. has the wrong temporal meaning) would have to be 'two-Oscar nominated', though, but actually we'd overwhelmingly say 'nominated for two Oscars'. The difference is that the 'Oscar' is the actual thing referred to, unlike the 'Michelin star'.
I notice the OED definition you quote has 'follows the same pronunciation rules' as the participle, but that isn't quite true, is it? 'Dogged' as an adjective is two syllables; as a participle, one – and there are some others similar.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2020 @ 5:38 pm
But the adjective "dogged" does not mean "in possession of a dog"; it means "similar to a dog", and therefore is not an example of the suffix in question.
I don't know about this; I'd expect something more like "the two-time Oscar nominee". (Although that would usually be for getting nominated in two different years; "nominated for two Oscars" might be more normal if talking about one entity being nominated in two categories in the same year.)
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2020 @ 5:45 pm
(Looking at the adjective/participle question from another direction, it seems fair to say that "beloved" derives from a participle, so that we can conclude that the pronunciation of the participle form was once different, and the age of the word is relevant to whether its pronunciation should be considered to match that of the participle.
But I still think "dogged" can't be interpreted as an example of this construction anyway.)
Julian said,
August 15, 2020 @ 6:34 pm
In Mark's linked post (in a comment) illogical morphology (example: 'associated with country or region X' adjectives), I was taken by the idea that the illogicalities might have evolved to aid sexual selection by the handicap principle.
Scene: a wine bar in Crewe, UK:
'So what do you do for a crust, Pat?'
'I manage a Lancastrian travel agency. Although my family background is Kentish.'
[thinks] ' mmm, nice!'
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2020 @ 7:09 pm
I took 'dogged' from the OED citation itself, so either way they are guilty of an inaccuracy. I chose it because it seemed clear that it could not have originated as a participle, unlike most others.
As for the Oscar nomination question, I was assuming we were referring to a single work, and you can't get nominations for the same work in different years (as my parenthetical stated). If we're talking about the same person accumulating awards for different works, yes, things on the pattern of 'the two-time Oscar nominee' would be expected. But in any meaning, we avoid things like 'the two-Oscar-nominated', even if correct.
Viseguy said,
August 15, 2020 @ 11:10 pm
"Michelin-two-star(red) restaurant" sits fine with me as an adjectival form of "a restaurant with two Michelin stars", while "two-Michelin-star(red) restaurant" sounds off despite its adherence to the original word order. I can't articulate why I feel this way, but it seems somewhat akin to why "big brown cow" is right and "brown big cow" is wrong — "Michelin" somehow demanding priority in the adjectival form, the way (what way?) that "big" sticks to "cow" to a degree that "brown" doesn't. To put it differently, if I were inventing a snappy internet abbreviation for a restaurant having two Michelin stars, I'd make it a(n) M2* restaurant, not a 2M* restaurant. But maybe that's just me.
Chas Belov said,
August 15, 2020 @ 11:10 pm
Thank you all for the fascinating discussion. I see that:
"michelin two star" has 34.8k Ghits
"michelin two-star" has 103k Ghits
"two michelin-star" has 568k Ghits
"two-michelin star" has 596k Ghits
"two-michelin-star" has 596k Ghits
"michelin two starred" has 22.8k Ghits
"michelin two-starred" has 23.7k Ghits
"two michelin-starred" has 275k Ghits
"two-michelin starred" has 275k Ghits
"two-michelin-starred" has 276k Ghits
"two michelin-starred restaurant" has 69.4k Ghits
"two michelin-starred restaurants" has 35.4k Ghits
So the hyphens, while they seem to affect the Ghit counts, may not be reported on consistently and may simply reflect previously-reported Ghit variability.
At any rate, the two going before the Michelin rather than after seems to be the preferred but by no means the unanimous ordering. And knowing that would make it sound any less wrong to me, although I would have accepted the two-hyphen "two-Michelin-starred" version.
Plus it removes the ambiguity of whether we are talking about one restaurant with two Michelin stars or two restaurants with an unspecified number of Michelin stars. And I wonder why I accept that construction much more readily once the "ed" is dropped, as I certainly don't share Johnson's or Coleridge's distaste for that suffix.
Chas Belov said,
August 15, 2020 @ 11:11 pm
Not that this possible ambiguity applies to the article I was moved to write concerning.
Kristian said,
August 16, 2020 @ 3:40 am
Johnson's reasoning is no doubt inaccurate, but his point seems to have been that constructions like "cultured plain", "daisied bank", "the honied Spring" represent a cheap and artificial way of making one's style more poetical, and that is a perfectly valid point. (The quotation is from his Life of Gray)
JPL said,
August 16, 2020 @ 4:03 am
@Chas Belov (11:11 pm):
Nice parenthetical clause! Thank you so much!
And while I'm at it, thanks to myl in the OP for "lagniappe". Wictionary has its etymology deriving from Quechua yapa via Spanish la yapa (nasalised "y"), which makes sense phonologically, but its usage as common in Louisiana, Trinidad and Tobago; so why Quechua? It's a pretty important concept in (at least) western and southern African cultures, and the offered English translation equivalents I've seen are not really equivalent wrt the essential spirit. What language contact situation produced this innovation in these speech communities?
David Marjanović said,
August 16, 2020 @ 5:15 am
And indeed, in German the only option is Zwei-Sterne-Restaurant: a loose compound noun with no verb form at all. Michelin is never mentioned, and it is not widely known that Michelin awards the stars as opposed to their being an objective measurable fact. If we did mention it, we'd resort to Restaurant mit zwei Michelin-Sternen.
That's a blatant calque from Greek into Latin and then from Latin into English. (German, BTW, is more tolerant of compound adjectives than English, but not that much.)
Did it originally mean "as if pursued by dogs"?
Adjective order is strict enough in English that I was explicitly taught it in school.
charles antaki said,
August 16, 2020 @ 8:32 am
It seems a long time ago, but in the UK, the unpopular national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) awarded one four ratings to University departmtents, with the possibility of a distinction at the top, represented by a star. So (some) people were proud to have a 4* or "four-starred" rating. (On the analogy of a "starred first" = first class degree with distinction, presumably.)
This passed into general understanding as "four stars" – to the chagrin, I assume, of those who saw their hard-won distinction bleached out of existence.
In any case the current, but equally unpopular, Research Excellence Framework) (REF) has given up on giving the distinction at he top, and each point along of the four levels is a "star" in its own right.
RfP said,
August 16, 2020 @ 3:09 pm
I recently read the following injunction in The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth;
“…adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”
I wonder how that affects which word order sounds best in this example.
Michael Watts said,
August 17, 2020 @ 2:59 am
I don't see why you need a special symbol to have a distinction at the top. Or stated another way:
The RAE rated departments on a five-point scale, 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 4* . This is obviously a mistake — the symbol * is serving no purpose. Just use 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5.
Philip Taylor said,
August 17, 2020 @ 5:10 am
A 4* rating is no different to an upper-second class degree in terms of irrationality. If you believe that departments should be rated 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5, then do you also believe that degrees should be first, second, third, and fourth class, as well as (of course) a "bare pass" ?
Michael Watts said,
August 17, 2020 @ 5:40 am
The only degree rating system I know of is "degree" / "cum laude" / "magna cum laude" / "summa cum laude".
Unlike most people, I can understand those names, but that doesn't actually add anything to the interpretation of the rank. (It does tell you what ranks above what, if you've forgotten.) They would be just as meaningful if numbered. All we know about "magna cum laude" is that it's better than "cum laude".
Philip Taylor said,
August 17, 2020 @ 7:12 am
Well, both the RAE and the concept of first-class, upper-second, lower-second, third and bare pass degrees are both British, so I was comparing like with like. I vaguely know of the existence of "* cum laude" degrees, but their existence has never really impinged on my stream of consciousness …
Yuval said,
August 17, 2020 @ 9:22 am
Picturing "a very peculiar felicity" in the same template as "a Very Special Blossom".
philip said,
August 17, 2020 @ 6:38 pm
Must be an American thing. I (occasionally) stay in five star hotels, but never in five-starred ones. And, if the hotel was owned by Trump, say, it would be a 'five star Trump' hotel.
Similarly, I would like to eat in a 'two star Michelin restaurant'.
Andrew Usher said,
August 17, 2020 @ 9:20 pm
And that's a third different word order! But it has the problem that it contains and suggests 'Michelin restaurant', which as in your own example of a 'five star Trump hotel', suggestes ownership by 'Michelin'.
The only order free of ambiguity is the original suggestion: "Michelin two-star restaurant", hyphenation and the participial suffix up to you. I agree that the suffix actually seems unusual – we wouldn't say "five-starred hotel" either – but it was in the original.
Kristian said,
August 18, 2020 @ 12:24 am
I think "restaurant with two Michelin stars" is clearly best, but if we insist on putting it in the front, then "two Michelin star restaurant" sounds best in my opinion. "Michelin two star restaurant" seems analogous to Beaufort force 9 wind or something like that, it sounds oddly technical.
I would say that a Michelin star is a real thing, not a real star obviously but a real symbol (printed in the guide book) and not a unit (food quality is not measured in stars, the stars are a symbolic reward).
"Two starred restaurant" seems wrong to me, just as "two starred general" would be wrong.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 18, 2020 @ 12:23 pm
David Marjanović: Thanks for the comment on the origin of "short-petiolate" and the like.
Andrew Usher: Yes, the suffix is so unusual that "two-starred restaurant" doesn't show up at Google ngrams for either American or British English I'm unpatriotically forced to admit that British publishers are stricter about hyphenation in this case.
Maybe "two star Michelin restaurant" is analogous to "three pounds avoirdupois", "17 degrees Celsius", etc.
Andrew Usher said,
August 18, 2020 @ 8:32 pm
If that last were true we'd expect to see things like 'two stars Michelin' or even just 'star(s) Michelin' is isolation, as we can get with 'pound(s) avoirdupois' and 'degree(s) Celsius'. It seems not.
Kristian's comparison actually shows the word-order difference accurately: a 'Beaufort force 9 wind' could never be a '9 Beaufort force wind' nor a 'force 9 Beaufort wind'. It has to be 'Beaufort force 9 wind', which is parallel to my 'Michelin two-star restaurant'.
Seeing the results of omitting a word shows the same: for example, '17 degrees Celsius' is often '17 degrees' or '17 Celsius', where the latter is used when we need to specify it is degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheir or Kelvin, while the former is used when we can assume that known. Similarly the 'Beaufort force 9 wind' can be also a 'force 9 wind' or 'Beaufort 9 wind' (the order still being fixed) and the 'Michelin two-star restaurant' either just a 'two-star restaurant' or a 'Michelin two restaurant' (certainly OK if uncommon), not a *'two Michelin restaurant'.
Maybe 'two Michelin star' is defensible if you think 'Michelin stars' can be thought of as real, but 'two star Michelin' is just a blunder.