English Translation
This is my final offer.
shouldn’t “ultime“ come after “proposition“?
I believe it’s natural to treat ultime similarly to dernier and premier, and place it before the noun.
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After I posted this question, there was another sentence in this same collection: “c’est ma proposition ultime.“ It had the same translation.
I did find a couple sentences in Le Petit Robert using ultime. In those sentences, ultime follows the noun.
- Dernier, final (dans le temps). « toutes les maladies mortelles présentent le même phénomène ultime, l’arrêt du cœur » (Bernanos).
- (anglais ultimate) ANGLIC. Le plus élevé en valeur. ➙ meilleur, suprême. La méthode ultime pour vaincre la fatigue. « Son kif ultime était d’écouter la radio en cherchant du porno sur le Web. » (Despentes).
© Le Petit Robert 2025
In the Larousse French only dictionary, it gives one definition and example and ultime precedes the noun:
Qui vient en dernier lieu dans le temps :
Ultime décision.
© Larousse 2025
Grevisse has a lot of text about where to put the adjective in Le Petit Bon Usage:
2. Règles particulières
a. L’adjectif se place avant le nom
En général, l’adjectif monosyllabique se place avant le nom polysyllabique qu’il qualifie
b. L’adjectif se place après le nom
En général, l’adjectif polysyllabique qualifiant un nom monosyllabique se place après celui-ci
c. La place de l’adjectif modifie le sens
Certains adjectifs peuvent aussi bien être placés devant que derrière le nom, sans que cela modifie fondamentalement le sens de l’énoncé.
So, here it says some adjectives can be placed before or after the noun without changing the meaning, they give an example of a sentence with magnifique before and after and it means the same thing. (Of course, for other adjectives, the meaning is changed by the placement.)
© Grevisse, Fairon, Simon 2019
So, maybe “ultime“ is an adjective that you can put before or after and it doesn’t change the meaning?
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Interesting one…
I’ll start with this:
The given translation is great, sounds perfectly natural.
That was my first thought as well.
The End.
I thought.
Then I read the above and thought ‘This doesn’t work’.
If ultime came after proposition, mon would have to be changed to “ma”.
Then I looked back at the French translation: “mon ultime proposition” Funny…
It’s funny because it’s not “supposed to be that way”. 
Typically posessive adjectives (mon, ton, son, ma, ta, sa…) agree with whatever is “being posessed” (owned). So since “proposition” is feminine, the corresponding posessive adjective “should be” ma (singular / feminine).
I will say it again - The given French translation is perfectly fine
Edit 2: I had listed a bunch of examples, thinking they were exceptions to “rule a”, but most of them were bad. (The adjectives I used sounded like 1-syllable words, but strictly speaking, most actually were not monosyllabic.). I could still list a few exceptions but I don’t really see a point anymore since “rule a” looks like a fine rule after all.
I will just add this:
- Un homme bon
- Le bon usage
The first example breaks “rule a”, whereas the second one conforms to it. (That’s good, considering example #2 also happens to be the tiltle of the book “rule a” is taken from ).
In the first example, “bon” is pronounced normally, whereas it is pronounced “bon[ne]” in the second.
Also, if you look at the word bonhomme (masculine) -bon + homme-, it is actually pronounced “bonne” + homme. (why? I don’t know what to say, other than “bon + homme” would just sound off).
As I said below, I think sound really does play a major role in deciding whether an adjective should come before or after the noun.
This is true. It works in some cases.
Une magnifique photo.
Une photo magnifique.
The example sentence is interesting because I could actually see “ultime” being moved around in some cases, even if it wouldn’t really work here.
So what to make of all this?
In this sentence:
- “ma” became “mon” because “ultime” starts with a “vowel sound” and “ma ultime proposition” would just sound wrong.
- Also there has to be a liaison between “mon” and “ultime” (i.e mon[n]ultime), otherwise it just sounds wrong.
It may not be much help to the French learners out there, but I really believe that what it all comes down to is sound - It either sounds “right” or it doesn’t.
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I see that on Tatoeba the pair of sentences are -
C’est mon ultime proposition.
C’est ma proposition ultime.
So that ties in with what you said.
I don’t know whether @corgwin24 actually saw a sentence with mon proposition ultime or just recalled that there was a sentence with proposition ultime and “filled in the gaps” so to speak for the rest of the sentence (according to sentence search there isn’t a sentence with mon proposition ultime on Clozemaster amongst all sentences that are searchable).
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Out of these 2 sentences, sentence #1 sounds more natural to me.
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FWIW, Google Ngrams is very clear about “ultime proposition” being far more common (in writing). As I expected, as for “proposition finale”, the converse is true.
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thanks for looking that up, morbrorper! Good to know.
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nope, zzcguns, it was my error in typing it, (still learning). Thank you for pointing it out. ugh…
I corrected it above.
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