A few days ago I posted some comments about this sentence from a gardening column my husband was writing:
Such plants include azalea, cape honeysuckle, camellia, tea olive, Carolina jessamine, and tabebuia trees.
I pointed out that our brains would automatically turn every plant listed into a tree. And I wondered whether a list in Latin would work the same way.
My friend Jenna passed that question on to a professor of Latin and Greek. The professor said she would have rearranged the items in the list, just as my husband and I did. And she pointed out that “tabebuia” in the original sentence is an adjective, while all the other items are nouns.
If you remove “trees,” tabebuia turns back into a noun:
Such plants include azalea, cape honeysuckle, camellia, tea olive, Carolina jessamine, and tabebuia.
This language of ours never ceases to amaze me.
(Thanks, Jenna!)