2100: The Nonsense of "Proper Adjectives" Sep 14, 2020

Although the term 'proper adjective' is used for orthographic purposes, it is syntactically meaningless. In English, people will distinguish a proper adjective as one formed from a proper noun; this does not happen in other languages like German for instance. Proper nouns are nouns which do not take an article, such as given names, which is a syntactically relevant distinction. While a word like 'Austria' would be a proper noun because it's the name of a country, nothing inherently distinguishes 'Austrian' from a common adjective like 'massive in "massive strudel" or 'Austrian strudel", even though both are formed from nouns. Therefore, the fact that it is capitalized will actually not indicate anything about the grammar. This also happens with verbs and adverbs such as 'Americanize'—proper only in name but not functionally different—but these are less common than adjectives usually. Scrabble does not allow for so-called proper adjectives.

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