当代英语中已经没有这种用法了,我们也知道正确的表达方式是什么,只是龙楠网友想要知道来龙去脉怎么回事,为啥偏偏要说two-months-old baby,我也比较感兴趣,我就以我查到的资料说说。
陈根花老师引用的这本“巧解君之疑”一书中的第64问,其原版英文出自于:
ELT Journal, Volume XIII, Issue 2, January 1959, Pages 79–83
这一期的回答是由F.T. WOOD和P.A.D. MACCARTHY共同回答的,Wood博士是我喜欢的学者。现附上原版英文部分(有兴趣可以去下载下来看看):
QUESTION. In ‘London Calling Europe’ I found the following sentence: The new motorway will have two thirty-six foot wide dual three-lane carriageways.’The use of foot as a plural puzzles me. Can I say ‘It is one hundred and twenty-three foot high’, ‘It is two hundred foot long’, or must I say feet? And if I must me feet, why is it foot in the sentence I have quoted?
ANSWER. This is partly covered by the answer to the previous question. You should say feet, not foot, in the sentences you suggest The one you quote is very badly constructed; it would have been better to say ‘two dual three-lane carriageways, each thirty-six feet wide.’
It may be added that when we get a compound adjective made up of plural number+noun+adjective, the whole combination being used attributively, usage is by no means consistent; sometimes a singular noun is the only idiomatic form, sometimes a plural. Thus we speak of a three-day-old chick and a five-year-old child, but a two-months-old baby. It is very difficult to account for the difference.
Quirk的17.108这一节中也提到:
A hyphen before the singular form is normal in expressions denoting age,time, weight, size, etc of the following type:
However, in quantitative expressions of the following type there is possible variation (cf 5.1 18 Note [b]):
a ten day absence [singular]
a ten-day absence [hyphen + singular]
a ten days absence [plural]
a ten days’ absence [genitive plural]
但并未出现two-months-old这样的情况,我手上的资料也没有对此的描述。
既然two-months-old baby被认为是idiomatic form,那就说明这是个很老的说法。
在“A COMPILATION OF RULES GOVERNING EXECUTIVE, CONGRESSIONAL, AND DEPARTMENTAL PRINTING”书(1913年)中看到这个:
AGE. My age is 52 years and 6 months; a boy 6 years old; a boy about 6 years old;3-year-old colt; 3-months-old child; wine 8 years old; wine 4 or 5 years old.
说明很早前就有这种说法了。
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