How do you say the same thing as a formal noun phrase in Chinese?

Question

I asked this earlier, which talked about:

• Giraffe 長頸鹿：long neck deer

What is still not clear to me was discussed a little in the comments, but I still don't get it. How do you say "long neck deer" and not mean giraffe? In English you might say "the black bear" as a casual description of a black-colored bear, or "the Black Bear" to mean the formal black bear species. But you are still allowed to say "black bear" when talking casually about black-colored bears.

Meanwhile, the comments seem to suggest you are not allowed to say "long neck deer 長頸鹿" in a casual way, and mean some long necked deer over there.

Clearly this is not a giraffe, but it is a long necked deer. So how can we say "long neck deer", but not mean Giraffe?

Please include English transcriptions/glosses for any Chinese script you include as I'm not a Chinese expert but would really like to understand. Maybe even pinyin if possible.

Comments said:

since 长颈鹿 is specifically the name for giraffe, no reasonable people will use it to mean deer unless they are trying to mislead on purpose.

And also:

A deer that has a long neck is a phrase that translated into Chinese would be 長頸的鹿, e.g. "長頸的鹿不單只有長頸的鹿" ( deers that have long necks are not just giraffes"

Does this mean that you must be extremely verbose to be descriptive in a casual way? What if a bunch of people were talking about "yellow-bellied frogs" casually, and they used "黄腹蛙 Huáng fù wā" (I pulled from google translate). Well then it turns out there was an actual scientific term for 黄腹蛙, does their usage now not make sense or is otherwise invalid?

Basically, how can you use the same descriptive terminology that is used in a formal name, but in a casual way? Or if not the same, then close to the same? What are the basic rules?

Like I said, in English you can talk about "blue whales" and have it mean any blue colored whale. But you can also talk about the formal scientific "Blue Whale" and no harm no foul. How do you do this similar sort of thing (or close to it) in Chinese?

Answer 1

To describe the same thing in a casual way, I usually separate the word into the adjective part and the noun part. Notice that what you mentioned as an example is the way to merge the adjective and the noun into a specified word; therefore, a simple way to describe it in a formal noun phrase is to divide the word.

To elaborate, as Tang Ho said, we might say 青蛇 (green snake) -> 青色的蛇 (snake with green color).

Another idea is to paraphrase the word, such as changing "neck (頸部)" into another word (脖子). But I am not very expert in English, so I don't have an exact example.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I said it before, you have to learn them one by one. Look it up in the dictionary every time you think there might be a chance that it is an existing compound word

Usually, 的 in "XX的YY" gives away the fact that it is not a compound word, on the other hand, XXYY is most likely one, for example, 大角羊 is most likely a compound word because if it is just sheep with big horns, you will use 大角的羊 instead. Look up 大角羊 and you'll find Bighorn Sheep

Another example:

There are many kinds of fish that are capable of eating humans, we would call these fish 食人的魚 (man-eating fish), but when you see the term 食人魚, you should look it up to see if it is a specific translation of an English noun, The result is yes, 食人魚 is Piranha

More examples:

長毛象 (mammoth) cannot be called 長毛的大象

綠蛙 (green frog) cannot be called 綠色青蛙

河馬 (hippopotamus) cannot be called 河中的馬

Answer 3

那头鹿的脖子看起来好长啊。
Look at the long neck on that deer!