How to refer to multiple entities that belong to multiple entities correctly?
So, for example, there are multiple books by multiple authors, and I want to talk about them. Is it correct to write "books authors"? Because "book authors" sounds like authors of one book...
I saw another example like this "The list contains English and French country names as well as the local names of the countries". I see countries are singular in the first case but plural in the second.
My use case is making identifiers in programming (variable and database table(s?) names), and I have not seen much use of "of" there. Maybe I should introduce "of" nevertheless.
Solution 1:
Is it correct to write "books authors"? Because "book authors" sounds like authors of one book.
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No it is not correct to write "books authors"
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"book authors" sounds like authors of one book - It doesn't sound that way to a native English speaker.
A book may be written by several authors and an author may write several books. The phrase 10 book authors, tells you that there are ten humans who are authors. It does not tell you which authors wrote which books. It does not tell you how many books. There may be one book written by all the authors or a thousand books written by any combination of authors.
Conclusion
"book authors" only tells you that that are numerous authors, it says nothing about how many books they have written. You can think of "book" as acting as an adjective.**
We can talk about 10 electric guitars but not 10 electrics guitars. There is no agreement of adjectives in English.
** As pointed out by fev, a noun used as an adjective can be called an epithet noun.