"The grammars consider the last element in a Bh 'functioning as an
adjective.' You're considering it functioning in some other way."
Since I believe it's relevant, let me clarify exactly what I was
saying in what you respond to above. Suppose for some reason the
english bahubbiihi 'red-head' had the form *'head-red'. It meant the
same thing, but just had this inverted form, ending with the
adjective.
Now given that it still means a person whose head is red, the final
'adjective' is not functioning alone to qualify the person. A
red-headed person is not red. Instead it qualifies 'head', i.e. it is
a qualifer internally within the compound. The entire bahubbiihi
*'head-red' then would function as an adjective to qualify the person
or stand for the person exocentrically.
These are the two different ways of 'functioning as an adjective' to
which I was referring and they are worth noting, especially since you
had trouble making this distinction at the outset, and were
misidentifying other cps as bahubbiihis.
Since you have criticized me for not following the grammars, let me
mention that this English example with 'head-red' is loosely based on
an example in Aggava.msa's Saddaniiti, in Helmer Smith's edition page
766 (Suttamaalaa sutta 708, bahubbiih' aññapadatthe) The example
given is 'hatthachinno' literally 'hand-severed'. One would normally
expect 'severed-hand' (like red-head, noun last) to describe a person
whose hands have been severed. The reverse form is also possible
however. The explanation runs:
hatthaa chinnaa yassa so 'ya.m hatthacchinno chinnahattho vaa.
tr: whose hands (hatthaa) are severed (chinnaa), he is hatthacchinno,
alternatively chinnahattho.
Look at the 'viggaha' (thanks Stephen) and it's clear that once
chinna is separated from the compound in an analysis it is not
coordinated with 'so'. Instead it is possessed by so through its
correlate 'yassa'. It is an 'adjective' qualifying hatthaa, and only
in the context of the entire compound does it comes to qualify the
person the cpd is describing.
Similarly, it does make sense to say, as I have done earlier, that a
word like 'dutiyo' functions as a noun within the context of a
bahubbiihi such as adutiyo 'alone', literally 'without a companion'.
This doesn't contradict the fact that the bahubbiihi, once formed, is
an adjective. The point again, is that dutiyo has gone from
adjective, to noun, to adjective again (in a different sense),
depending on which level of the analysis you are looking at. 1.
dutiyo, primary adjective, ordinal numeral 'second' > 2. dutiyo, noun
'a second, a companion' > 3. component in adjectival bahubbiihi
'adutiyo' 'lacking a companion, alone'. The senses in which it is an
adjective in 1 and 3 are quite different.
This originally came up because you were taking Pali compounds along
the lines of (to use english analogues) 'leaf-green' or
'moth-eaten', describing, say, a sweater, and calling them examples
of bahubbiihis. Both end in adjectives which directly describe the
thing they qualify, and which could stand alone and still function in
that way. Around a dozen of your examples involved diverse
misreadings of the compounds involved. That's why you got the kinds
of answers you did, specifically that you can't put adjectives at the
end of bahubbiihis like you were doing. You didn't seem to understand
the 'classic' bahubbiihi yet, so no one thought you were in a
position to talk about more anomolous ones.
I am now convinced that there are many less-common forms of
bahubbiihis, but I don't see the need to make such harsh accusations
against Alan as you have done in some recent posts (accusing him of
intransigence etc). It might be enough for him to do something like
amend his description to say it's describing the 'classic bahubbiihi'
(which does fit his description) and then mention some exceptional
cases. He is, in any case, waiting to respond until he has further
thought through the matter, which I consider an admirable course of
action.