Hi
I was trying to build the word toy monster or toy(anything). I assumed it was “le petit monstre” or “le jouet monstre” or 'le jouet monster??). I couldn’t find any of these combinations online. I hope someone can help me with the proper phrasing. I look forward to your feedback.
I should have written
le monstre jouet
You left out the preposition; the expression you were looking for appears to be monstre de jouet.
The phrasing is a little odd… Basing myself on other toy descriptions I’ve seen and heard, I’d be more likely to say “un monstre minature” (a miniature monster) or “un monstre en bois” (a wooden monster) or some such phrasing. The phrasing “un X jouet” seems like a calque from English.
I tend to agree with xnylder - I don’t think French will necessarily map one-to-one onto English for this one. You might have to translate each “Toy X” to a different French phrase.
Unfortunately I know just enough French to know that the OP versions, and the versions in the first reply, probably won’t do.
It doesn’t seem that consistent. What about toy radios? I’ve seen “radios jouets”. Is that wrong?
Un monstre jouet means an enormous toy (in this case monstre is an adjective)
Un monstre de jouet means a monster of a toy (which isn’t a toy monster)
A toy monster is correctly translated as un monstre-jouet, hyphenated please. In this case monstre is a noun.
I admit it’s a little difficult and awkward because of the ambiguity noun/adjective.
(francophone and word freak here)
Thank you very much. Gymnopithys. I have only come across that hyphenated term once in all my searches. I didn’t register at all. Thank you all.
English turns nouns into adjectives willy-nilly. (Can we blame the Germans?) a dog house roof color could be red or green, for example. Or a railroad locomotive coupling hook or library shelf bookend, etc. I assume French does not subscribe to this technique?
That’s not how I’d interpret it. Un jouet monstre, maybe; un jouet monstrueux, maybe too (though probably not, it sounds more like it means a toy of unspecified size that looks like a monster); but un monstre jouet to me simply means a toy monster. The same way un camion jouet means a toy truck. You suggest to hyphenate it, which makes sense and is probably how I’d write it, but I’m not convinced it’s necessary.
xnylder seems to think it’s a calque from English, but I don’t see any evidence that it is. Though I don’t think it’s a form I’d easily find in a dictionary either.
And I assume “dog house roof color” would be all one word in German?
This is called apposition, and I don’t think it came into French via English. Apposition of nouns occurs in other languages, like Latin and Greek.
I don’t think Dachfarbe is the same as die Farbe des Dachs ???
Careful here. It is correct to say that English turns nouns into modifiers, but not quite into adjectives. They are called noun adjuncts. To appreciate the difference consider the following sentence (which happens to be true): The BROWN building on the McGill campus is a brown BUILDING. In other words in a phrase noun-adjunct noun, the first word is (usually) stressed while in an adjective noun construction, it is the noun that normally bears the stress. Obviously, there are exceptions, such as when you contrast a brown building with a red one or the Brown building with the Brown baseball diamond.
In general, no, French does not make use of this construction, but often inserts a preposition - a snowman is an homme de neige, a bus station is a station de bus
There are a couple of odd exceptions where a hyphen is used - suicide attack is attentat- suicide
Willy-nilly or not, you should probably blame the ancient Proto-Indo-Europeans. Sanskrit is full of those compound words!