Talk:absolute superlative

Catalan etc.

I'm 99% sure that Catalan also has such a form. I'll try to remember to check my grammar... — Hippietrail 13:10, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Catalan does but apparently it's rare: [1]

Portuguese does too: [2]

Which leeds me to believe that Galician must, and Occitan and Provençal might too... — Hippietrail 02:18, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

If that proves to be the case, then the definition can be modified to say "in Romance languages", or, if not, "in most..." or "in some...). — Paul G 10:46, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Well I'm 99% sure that French doesn't have them and I have no idea about Romanian yet. It could be just a certain branch of the family — it would be better to put which branch than "some". Also I think I read about it in at least one non-romance language — but that was probably in a grammar written in a romance language and could've been due to perspective... — Hippietrail 10:52, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps it might be better to remove language-specific information from the definition, then? I'm sure "absolute superlative" would mean the same thing in whatever language it would apply to, whether or not it was Romance or "-issimo" shaped. A list of languages using it and its formation in each is more encyclopedia information, however short it may be. —Muke Tever 19:23, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It is used in modern greek, but I am not quite sure if it has the completly same meaning. My grammar (Mackridge and friends) states that greek is the only language which has an absolute superlative, but that just goes to show that you can never trust Oxford professors.Ptalatas 03:44, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Definition

The current definitions should just be examples. Another example would be German, which also has an absolute superlative as seen in "Wir hatten in den Ferien schönstes Wetter." (from canoo). Same should be true for English, like

• relative superlative: There are five men. Peter is the biggest (of them).
• absolute superlative: Peter is the biggest.

-Bernhardus Albinus (talk) 16:12, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

The definition provided for Romanian is wrong. It is in fact the same as other romance languages (or even others as well it seems) and refers to certain adjective forms that express the highest possible degree of a property. As such, a key property is that an absolute superlative cannot be expressed as a degree (more ###, less ###) because it is by definition the highest, and it is a grammatical error to relativise it. Hence why there are relative superlatives, for example "impressive" would be: the most impressive and this tolerates degrees of comparison like less impressive, or as impressive, or very impressive. An absolute superlative is constructed in such a way as it may not be relativised or compared with other forms or degrees of itself. For example "great", or "best". It is absolute because it is incorrect to employ any degrees, one cannot say more great, less great or the most great.

This is how I learned the meaning of absolute and relative superlative degrees, and I'm not sure why certain sources give the form "foarte ###" which just means "very" and so although it places the adjective on an extreme of a spectrum (very good or very bad) this nevertheless tolerates the existence if said spectrum for that adjective and so by definition it makes it a relative, not absolute, form. BlackSerpentIC (talk) 05:49, 11 July 2022 (UTC)