I apperciate anyone who answer this question. Thank you in advance
I have a problem with combining the words and I appreciate anyone who helps me in this way. when we want to describe a word, as far as I know, there are two ways.
1) adjective+noun
Examples: beautiful flower -tall man- clever student
obviously we can't use (noun+adjective) groups such as: flower beautiful - man tall- student clever.
This is quite obvious.
2) but sometimes we use noun as an adjective (noun as adjective+ real noun)
Examples: race horse- history teacher- people champion and so on
in such situation I get quite confused. for example when I want to combine (race and horse), there are two options for me and I can't realize which one is correct grammatically? race horse and horse of race (noun as adjective+real name) or (name+of+second name). how can I solve this problem? how I can realize which one is right? people champion or champion of people?
Search from various English teachers...
Answers · 7
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I agree with the other posters, but I would add that for your particular example, "champion of the people" is the usual expression, if by "(the) people" you mean the people of a country. (Notice "THE"!) "People champion" is NOT an expression native speakers use. You, by luck, picked one of the exceptions to the rule! You can also sometimes say "teacher of history", if you are emphasizing that he or she is NOT a teacher of something else. But "history teacher" is much more common.
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I would say to always use the "noun as adjective + actual noun" structure almost every time. Although English does use the "noun of noun" structure sometimes, it's almost always used in old literature or location , such as: John of Cambridge.
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(noun as adjective+real name) sounds correct and natural: race horse
(name+of+second name) sounds very strange.
In race horse, race is a noun being used as an adjective. But there are no possessives being used (race's horse).
Noun of noun has the same effect if the possessive is being used, but here it is not being used. So it sounds very strange.
Just like flower of beautiful sounds strange. If the noun is being used as an adjective, it doesn't matter that it's also a noun. It just matters that in this context it's an adjective. And "noun of adjective" isn't right. (shirt of blue, cat of fat...these are wrong. It should be blue shirt and fat cat).
I guess those noun+noun words are just compound nouns. They are as they are. If you learn a compound noun like race horse as race horse, you have to know there's no other correct way to write it. It doesn't and can't be written horse of race.
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it's my problem too
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