adjectives before/after the noun.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on March 23, 2012 at 5:29am

In general, the 'default' position for court is to come before the noun when you're just matter-of-factly saying that something is 'towards the short end of some kind of scale'.

On the other hand, placing it after the noun has the effect of suggesting an opposition or binary contrast-- in effect it means "short rather than long".

The converse is true long: if you put it before the noun, it means something like "inherently, measurably long on some kind of scale", whereas after the noun it means something more like "categorically long as opposed to short".

I don't know if this example helps: I might say e.g. "Je vais faire un court séjour en Italie", meaning 'some  small number of days, but I don't really have an idea in my head of what precise number of days would constitute 'short' vs 'long''. On the other hand, a travel agent might define categories "séjour court: 1 à 7 jours"; "séjour long : plus de 7 jours".

Now I think about it, I guess petit-grand more or less fall into this pattern too.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on March 23, 2012 at 5:40am

P.S. I'd need to think about it a bit more, but I suspect the same basically goes for "bas"/"haut" as well.

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Permalink Reply by george willms on March 23, 2012 at 5:45am

Thanks, Neil. This has got me thinking about other before/after cases as well.

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