Court Martial

[Noelia]

This is not very important, I just wanna know out of curiosity..

If there's a MARTIAL LAW, why is it COURT MARTIAL?

I hate it when you break the rule of using the adjective after the noun like we do... It took me a lot of time to get used to it, and now you wanna change it back..... no no.

Noelia

[johnr]

Parece que se escribe 'court martial' como 'court-martial'. ¿Quizá esto tiene algo que ver tu pregunta?
Tengo que salir ahora. cuando vuelva voy a buscar más.

[sendai]

I was sure that it was because it a French term, but all the dictionaries I checked swear that we used to say "martial court" and later we changed it to "court marital". (In like 1575 or something.) That's really strange.

In any case, we do not think of this term as a noun modified by an adjective. It's just a plain old compound noun, and like many others (skyscraper, for example) we don't try to interpret it as separate words.