I always hear the phrase “buenas noches” (or is it buenos noches?), and never really thought about it until now. I remember learning in high school Spanish that the adjective always comes after the noun. Is this an exception?
Gracias!
Buenas noches means “Good evening”, or rather, ‘good evenings’. You can also leave it singular (buena noche - also in some dialects of Spanish, such as Argentinian, the final ‘s’ may be swallowed even when it’s supposed to be there). However, there is another phrase, La Noche Buena which is our Christmas Eve, ‘the good night’.
No it doesn’t. The placing makes a difference in meaning:
una casa grande
una grande casa
mean two different things:
a big house
a great house (as in famous)
Alright, so buenas noches means “good evening” instead of “good night.” I still don’t understand how you determine when the adjective comes.
So does every phrase have two different meanings depending on where the adjective is? Maybe it’s because I just woke up, but I’m not really seeing a pattern here. Is there a consistant way each phrase changes when the adjective comes afterwards, or does it vary for each phrase?
Buenas noches means both good evening and good night. A Spanish speaking person will use it both when greeting someone and bidding farewell. This is one of the reasons a Spaniard might show up to a party at 7 p.m. and - in English - great the other guests with “Good Night Everyone!”.
Buenas Noches doesn’t have anything to do with “normal” grammar, it’s a phrase that’s now practically a single word. Much as someone in English is not actually asking another person how that person does, when saying how-do-you-do? as a single word. It’s just a phrase or greeting. There’s probably a linguistic phrase for this that some more learned Doper will provide.
As for adjectives in general.Some of them can go both before and after, some really don’t. It’s the ambiguous that create the confusion. Don’t look for logic. Languages weren’t created logically.
Idioms, I think them’s called. Just one more part of the language experience that lets you figger out kwickly whose not from around these parts.
Besides, in the immortal words of Walter Pigeon, “We do it because it feels good.”
Adjectives don’t necessarily come after nouns in Spanish. That’s generally the case, but some adjectives - bueno being one of them - usually precede the noun. And there’s a whole group of adjectives that have two meanings depending where they’re placed. For instance, antiguo means “ancient” if it follows the noun, but “former” as in el antiguo presidente, “the former president” if it precedes it. Plus most adjectives can be placed before or after the noun to give slight differences in meaning.
Generally an adjective placed after the noun indicates that it’s restricting the meaning of the noun to certain referents. For example, los Andes chilenos limits the discussion to the Andes that are in Chile, as opposed to those in Argentina or Ecuador. Los altos Andes, on the other hand, is purely descriptive, since all of the Andes are tall (that’s what makes them mountains!) Or, to take an example from a grammar book I have: Las hojas secas se cayeron means “The dry leaves fell” but implies that some leaves weren’t dry, and they stayed on the tree. But Las secas hojas se cayeron means that all the leaves were dry, and all of them fell, and secas, “dry”, is purely descriptive and doesn’t serve to distinguish between two types of leaves. You’ll see this usage in poetry a lot; I can’t remember the poem itself but something we read in one of my literature classes referred to la roja sangre, “the red blood”. Roja precedes the noun because it’s an unnecessary, flowery description; all blood is red, so it’s not vital to the meaning of the sentence.
So there’s no easy hard-and-fast rule for adjective placement.
Right, except that “grande” before a noun becomes “gran”: una gran casa.
:smack:
I knew something was off.
Gran(de) and san(to) drop the final syllable when they precede most nouns, the exceptions being ones that begin with de- and to- respectively. The “magnificent” breakfast of hotel ads would be el grande desayuno, the -de not being dropped but rather reduplicating the de- of desayuno in order to prevent ambiguity: Was that a “gran desayuno” or a “grande sayuno” (whatever one of those might be)? Likewise, San Cristobal and San Juan take the short form, but Santo Tomas the long one – to avoid the ambiguity of a San Tomas vs. a Santo Mas (presumably a large-sized saint). With santo, of course, the feminine santa is never clipped. And the distinction of descriptive vs. restrictive that Excalibre outlined is pretty standard idiomatic usage. (Note that English usage does include idioms with postnominal adjectives: The 51 members of the National Council of Attorneys General all sent Mother’s Day cards to their mothers-in-law.)
Masculine singular bueno is also contracted: a buen hambre no hay pan duro.
I understand that “santo” is only clipped when preceding a saint’s name. When simply used as an adjective meaning “holy,” it isn’t: el Santo Padre; ¡Santo cielo!
Adjectives that are part of longer adjective phrases are also regularly placed after the noun: …and of all things visible and invisible…
And also in poetic uses: …I summon up remembrance of things past…
Don’t forget that “noche buena” is what they call that Christmas flower whose name escapes me now. Named for an American ambassador who “discovered” it in Mexico. Oh, Poinsetta.
It’s also a good brand of Mexican Christmas style beer.
You got me …
However, anybody who find a way to quote Cranmer, Shakespeare, and Proust quoting Shakespeare in two single-sentence paragraphs deserves nothing but my respect and affection:
buenos nachos