New Caledonian
1
5.6
- adjective
Examples
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This is George, the giant new Caledonian gecko, largest gecko in the world.
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There have been loads of other studies documenting the advanced cognitive skills of ravens and crows, especially the New Caledonian crows.
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But humans aren't alone in this ability: New Caledonian crows can also reason about hidden mechanisms, or "causal agents," a team of scientists reported Sept. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Because New Caledonian crows are also inventive and skillful tool users, Taylor and his colleagues thought the birds might have causal reasoning skills similar to those of humans.
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The New Caledonian culture is known for its vibrant traditional music and dance.
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The New Caledonian crows demonstrate remarkable intelligence by using sticks to extract insects from tree bark.
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During our trip, we learned about the New Caledonian customs surrounding the annual festival celebrating their heritage.
Surface Forms
Morphology
new + Caledonian
The adjective is fully compositional: 'New' + the place-derived adjective 'Caledonian' yields ‘relating to New Caledonia,’ so the meaning is directly derivable from the constituents. This place-name adjective pattern is common cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the parts would readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
New Caledonian comes from the island name New Caledonia, which Captain Cook gave because its coast looked like Caledonia, an old name for Scotland. So New + Caledonian originally meant 'a new Scotland', and today New Caledonian means 'from or relating to New Caledonia'.