The same person

Question

in the clause "the same person", same seems to intriduce a comparison, is there an ellipsis of a constituency such as " as i saw before" or whatever, or can we the the adjective "same" on its own?thanks for losing time with my stupid questions!!

Maverick88 · Accepted Answer

If I understand you correctly, there's no ellipsis. Probably we can think of it as an ellipsis but of a somewhat obvious kind. I mean there's is a comparison and you compare a person to the person you are talking about. The comparison is kind of implicit.Something like:
"Actually, he is the same person [as the person we are talking about]"

Paco2004 · Answer

'Same' is a *** word. In usual dictionaries it is classified as an adjective but it is not a usual adjective. It should be almost always accompanied by 'the'. Therefore one cannot say;
*) Today my foolishness is as same as it was yesterday.
though some Japanese and Koreans online sites are using this kind of construction.

The word 'same' seems to have its origin in the old Scandinavian language [Old Norse], and before the Viking era, an obsolete word 'ilke' was prevalently used instead of 'same'. The usages of 'ilke' seems to have been almost the same as that of 'same'. It was also always accompanied by 'the'. So people often wrote 'the ilke' as 'thilke'.
If thilke citee be bildid, thou schalt not haue possessioun biyende the flood. [Wycliff's Bible]

To satisfy my foolish curiosity, I surveyed how many sites Google hits for the word 'thesame'. The total number was 240,000. It would be possible OED gives an entry of 'thesame' in future.

paco

The same person

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions