James Tauber

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The Rubik's Cube Can Be Solved But Is It Grammatical?

In my previous post I mentioned Joyner's paper Mathematics of the Rubik's Cube.

The phrase "The Rubik's Cube" sounds odd because you can't normally use an article with a pre-nominal genitive if the pre-nominal itself wouldn't normally take an article.

You can say "the paper", "the professor" and "the professor's paper". You can say "David's paper" but not "*the David's paper". (Although note that if talking about the sculpture "the David", you can say things like "the David's left hand". And, because of Donald Trump, you could say "the Donald's hair".)

You can't say "the Rubik" and so "the Rubik's cube" seems ungrammatical if you think about its component parts.

What's happening is, of course, that "Rubik's" isn't acting as a genitive anymore but rather "Rubik's Cube" has been reanalyzed as an opaque compound noun. It's just still written in terms of its components.

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Comments (3)

Nat on March 27, 2008:

Maybe I've just so thoroughly absorbed its compound noun status, but I don't see anything awkward about "The Rubik's Cube". I suspect that a big part of it is my understanding of the word "Rubik". Not ever having heard the word outside of the context of the Cube, I don't 'know' that it doesn't take an article as I do with "David".

Of course, it might just be that I thought it was spelt "Rubix Cube" until like five years ago.

James Tauber on March 27, 2008:

If you thought it was spelt "Rubix Cube" that's evidence you, from the start, interpreted it as a compound noun (possibly in part because "the Rubik's Cube" would have been ungrammatical)

But if you knew initially that the inventor was Ernő Rubik and hence the name "Rubik's Cube" then calling it "the Rubik's Cube" might seem odd.

James Tauber on March 27, 2008:

It occurs to me that if someone didn't know the word "cube" was but knew of the name Rubik, they may have analyzed it as "the Rubik scube"

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Created: March 27, 2008
Last Modified: March 27, 2008
Author: jtauber