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What is the capital of Tunisia?

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What is the capital of Tunisia?

How can I find the meaning of an adjective that comes before the noun?

Almost every adjective can come before the noun, and for the vast, vast majority of them with the exact same meaning as when they’re post-nominal.

The adjective might be anteposed for stylistic or dialectal reasons. Higher registers will do it more often. Diachronically speaking, French has been moving from allowing every adjective to appear before the noun and rarely placing them after, to systematically placing them after the noun, but the current situation is one of change in progress, which explains the sometimes very large regional and register variations you’ll encounter.

For the handful of adjectives who do change meaning when place depending on their placement relative to the noun, any dictionary will mention it.

Rather than listing the adjectives who can placed before the noun (which is the norm), here’s a list of those that can’t:

  • Colour terms: Outside a few fixed expressions or place names from an older stage of the language (le Rouge Cloître in Belgium, l’expression “blanc-seing”) colour adjectives always come after the noun.

  • Nationalities: Un pain français, une attitude américaine. There’s one exception, used when you want to imply something is typical of the nationaly, in which case the adjective is always preceded by très: Both “Sa très américaine attitude” and “Son attitude très américaine” is possible.

Besides those, anything goes.

 

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What is the capital of Tunisia?