It's I/me (choose what you want ) again.
It is a bone of contention between prescriptivists and descriptivists. When in Rome, do as
the Romans do and say "It is me".
The English are
The wise are
Nightmare, wise and English belong to which (formal) word class? Of course they are adjectives. They are unfaithful adjectives. They are renegades who defy order. They are bad adjectives that give us migraine.
When Quirk says
some (= not all) adjectives can be noun-phrase heads, he cuts word classes some slack. These nominalized adjectives have generic reference and take plural concord.
Why are these adjectives strange?
- Adjectives are usually not preceded by a determiner.
- They do not prompt accord in number with verbs.
- Adjectives are usually not noun phrase heads.
We say 'He is wiser', but we do not say 'The wiser are'.
We say 'He is very wise' and we say 'The very wise are'.
However, we do not say 'The very English are'.
The English who like... -- It looks like the relative pronoun has an adjectival antecedent. :shock:
The blue played weakly. :cross:
Remember,
When Quirk says some (= not all) adjectives can be noun-phrase heads,
The reds played well. :tick:
The Englishes played well. :cross:
Looks like English follows French, Hungarian, Latin, etc. grammar sometimes in terms of adjective declension.
Nightmare, you have an extraordinary nose for finding the minefields in English grammar. In your previous life, were you not a detection dog?