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Re: smallest ANCIENT non-bird dinosaur - was what I was asking



Something I find interesting here is that English consistently uses
adjectives (eg. "the Cretaceous") while German and Swedish use nouns
(_die Kreide_, _krita_, resp.) for segments of geological time. What
do other languages do?

Danish: noun, Icelandic: noun, both Norwegians: noun, Dutch: noun, French: noun, Spanish: adjective, Portuguese: both, Catalan: apparently noun only, Italian: both, Breton: noun, Baltic languages: noun, Slavic languages: noun (but not the same one in all of them), Greek: adjective, Ossetic: apparent adjective derived from the Russian noun, Hungarian: noun, Turkish: noun, Vietnamese: I can't figure it out, Indonesian: apparently noun... The Chinese term starts with "white" and probably ends in a noun ("white-rock period"?), but how much sense the distinction between nouns and adjectives makes in Chinese in the first place is AFAIK debatable.


(Using Wikipedia as a dictionary is awesome.)