Creating new adjectives
In English, (I feel that) we can turn any word or phrase into an adjective. It happens all the time in everyday speech. Does this work in Spanish?
An example I came across in a cartoon was "Does it have super platypus powers?" Here the noun "platypus" has turned into an adjective to describe the noun "powers". Yet, the Spanish translation was "¿Tiene súper poderes de ornitorrinco?", not (as I expected) "¿Tiene súper poderes ornitorrincos?".
Essentially, I expected "ornitorrinco" to turn into an adjective and modify "poderes" like it did in English, but it seems that in Spanish, you can't do this. You have to add "de" in between.
Another, more practical, example is "love song". In Spanish, you have to add "de" in between the two words; you can't use "love" as an adjective. So you have to say "canción de amor".
So then how would someone translate "The one semester of Spanish love song"? In this phrase "One semester of Spanish", a phrase, has been turned into an adjective and modifies "love song".
My guess, using what I learned above, is to translate it as "La canción de amor de un semestre de español", which repeats the word "de" 3 times and sounds really cluncky.
Another example is "Epic Rap Rattles of History" which I'd render as "Batallas épicas de rap de la histora" which also sounds wordy.
Is there a more elegant solution to this problem of turning nouns into adjectives?
1 Answer
English is my native language and my Spanish isn't the greatest, so my word on this is definitely not gospel. That being said, I think that you can turn nouns into adjectives in Spanish, but you have to add an ending to the noun to make it an adjective. So, for example: the noun "historia" becomes the adjective "histórico."
