Ask the English Teacher

Compound Adjective Problems

Oksana in Russia writes:
I've been teaching EFL for about 4 years, and the longer I teach it the more complicated it seems, the more lacunae in my knowledge I discover.

That’s exactly my experience...and I’ve been teaching English for 41 years! :-)

The problem I'm struggling with now, is whether there are any rules regulating the choice between
A + Numeral + Noun (a sixteen-week semester, a two-bedroom flat)
and
A+Numeral+Noun+ed (a one-layered disk, a three-headed monster)
constructions used as noun modifiers.
Is it the nature of the defined noun, the relations between the noun and the attribute or something else that tells us what construction to choose? And what would be the right way to say: a three-storey house or a three-storeyed house?

I try to explain to my students that it’s not a two flat and also a bedroom flat, but a two-bedroom flat: the two words take a hyphen to show that we should read them as a single adjective. The compounds can get even longer: day-to-day routine, six-and-a-half-year-old child, and so on.

We do have an exception: If part of the compound is an adverb ending in –ly, we don’t hyphenate: a truly sincere man, a really talented dancer.

As for your second question, someone else recently asked me about this and I realized something: When we use a part of a body as part of an adjective, we add –ed. For example:
a three-headed monster
a one-eyed man
a three-legged stool
a four-footed animal
a tight-fisted miser

But for other terms, we don’t use –ed. And we don't use a plural form of the noun in the compound adjective! For example:
a three-storey house (three-story house in North America!)
a one-layer disk (and a seven-layer cake)
a two-car garage
a six-and-a-half-year-old child
an eleven-man team

And here's another confusing problem: When "body" parts are also units of measurement, we don't add -ed. A six-foot man is a tall man; a six-footed man would be a monster. (If you live in a country that uses the metric system, this is just more proof that the English and North Americans are crazy.)

The Use of "There"

I've recently received two very different questions, but they both deal with the use of "there" at the beginning of a sentence. Here's the question from Linda:

Of seventeen English translations of the Qur’an, ten interpret Surah 20: 8 using “He”:
“God! There is no god but He. The most beautiful names are His.”
Seven use “Him”:
“God! There is no god but Him. The most beautiful names are His.”
Translators using “He” include Arberry and George Sale, whose first language was English.
Translators using “Him” include Pickthal, an educated Englishman.

So which is correct? Is it ‘He’ as a predicate nominative? Or is it ‘Him’ in the objective case? What is the rule?

Not having read the Qur’an in over 40 years, I hesitate to rush in where translators fear to tread. But...here goes.

The problem really arises from one of my pet peeves: Sentences beginning with “There is” and “There are.” Long ago an editor taught me what a problem such sentences are, since “there” is an expletive, doing nothing in the sentence except introducing what it’s about. Shame on all those translators for creating a problem where (I suspect) none exists in Arabic.

Could you translate the passage as: “God! Only He is God”? Or: “God! He is the only God”?

If you feel you must stick with “There is,” then treat “but” as a preposition synonymous with “except,” which would require “him” as the pronoun.

Then Gabriela in Bucharest wrote:

In my teaching activity I have often come across sentences of this type:

There have been published no documents regarding this event.
There have been made a lot of changes in this system.

I find these sentences wrong but they are probably used in spoken English/ American English, in films, and so on. Am I right in correcting my students or can I accept these forms? In my opinion the sentences shoud be:

No documents have been published.....
A lot of changes have been made....

I explained the "expletive" problem to Gabriela, and then added:

Even more important, the beginning of an English sentence is a “hot spot,” where readers pay the most attention and react most strongly to what they read. They may understand the content of the middle of the sentence, but they don’t respond as much. (The same is true for sentences in the middle of a paragraph...we aren’t paying as much attention as we do to the beginning and end of the paragraph.)

Here is another problem: “There” is at the beginning of the sentence, so many speakers and writers think of it as the subject. And it sounds singular, so they often make a big mistake in subject-verb agreement: “There is two people here to see you.” “There’s a lot of problems facing us.” No, they should be: “There are two people...” and “There are a lot...”

So I urge my students to write sentences like “No documents have been published,” "Two people are here to see you," "We face a lot of problems"--and sometimes they listen to me!

Propensity

Michael asks:
I recently had the following question marked wrong on a homework assignment where, among other words, we were required to use the word propensity, so I used the following sentence: "Many claim poor handwriting is a propensity for being a doctor." However, the student teacher who marked it wrong was unable to give an explanation as to why it was marked wrong, so I was wondering if you could help me with explaining why it was marked incorrectly.

Propensity, my dictionary tells me, means "a natural disposition or tendency...a liking for; partiality." So it's got to be a trait of a person, not of a skill like handwriting. If you turned the sentence around, however, it could work: "Doctors have a propensity for bad handwriting."