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The unexpected rule of adjectival ordering in English (2016)
- arkj 6y agoInteresting rule! >>a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife I am not a native English speaker but there is a sense of something odd about this description. But (I am always confused about starting with but) I would not think anything is wrong with "a lovely old little green rectangular French silver whittling knife". I had a team mate who always used passive voice in technical documentation. My manager always used to point it out to him but he was never able to fix it. Once he got mad and said, "Ma'am, I have no idea what you are talking about, this is the only voice I know". On his next Birthday she gifted him a copy of Lynn Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves. He later said that was the best book gift he ever got.
- geomark 6y agoNot sure why your mate's manager had a problem with passive voice. Passive voice is often the correct choice in documentation. Passive voice emphasizes the doing, not the doer. People usually don't care about who did the doing in technical documents.
- lokedhs 6y agoAs a native Swedish speaker, I tend to follow Swedish documentation writing rules even when I write English. In particular, one should always use passive voice, and also avoid terms such as "you". In other words, write "How to achieve X", rather than "How do I do X"? The point I want to make is that when I write documentation, and change the latter to the former, most people seem to agree it's better.
- euroderf 6y agoDisagree. Pervasive passive voice is an obfuscating irritant. In a description of a multi-step procedure, IMO better to switch to "you". It clearly flags actions for the reader to take. Keepin' it clear & simple.
- eythian 6y ago> "a lovely old little green rectangular French silver whittling knife" As a native speaker, but without any editorial training, this feels slightly off to me. My first edit would be something like "a lovely little old", because "lovely little" feels like it should go together. Whether that's due to alliteration or "little old lady" being a not uncommon phrase, I couldn't say for sure.
- jwalton 6y agoI'm with you on that one. I'd say, for example, "We went to a lovely little park", rather than "a little lovely park." The second sounds wrong for some reason.
- tricolon 6y ago"lovely" is an opinion, so it fits the rule to put it in front, right?
- Viliam1234 6y agoNot a native speaker, but "a little lovely" kinda sounds like an opposite to "much lovely". That is, my parsing of "a little lovely park" is ambiguous between "a little (lovely park)" and "a (little lovely) park". With "a lovely little park" there is no ambiguity.
- dmitriid 6y agoHow to turn a concise tweet into a 3000-word essay with zero additional substance (and half a thousand tracking cookies).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- camillomiller 6y agoAnd calling anyone who cares about grammar a stickler as if we were in high school
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoPedantry over rules that do not actually reflect the way native speakers speak is bad.
- camillomiller 6y agoStudying grammar is studying the building blocks of what defines the way think about reality —- language. The article calls stickler anyone who’s interested in the intricacies of grammar. Multiple times.
- uryga 6y ago> language defines the way we think about reality citation needed :)
- camillomiller 6y agoHere it is. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shape... :)
- gkya 6y ago
- gostsamo 6y agoThis is about order of specificity. The more vague is the adjective, the further it is from the noun. Also, the closer the adjective is to the noun, the more it modifies its meaning like "french kiss".
- dash2 6y agoWhy is age vaguer than colour?
- gostsamo 6y agoBecause it is usually something like young/old which could be subjective. I'm of the opinion that those two could be swapped in some cases, but I'm not native speaker and can't defend the opinion with facts.
- D-Coder 6y agoBecause an object's colour is more likely to be a permanent, intrinsict part of the object; its age is going to change (all the time!).
- camillomiller 6y agoThe book’s example is not the best. Green great dragons can absolutely exist, if great dragons were a breed of dragons, like great danes. In that case great would be a way more specific modifier of the noun dragons, as it defines a subgroup of the group of the noun. That’s why it can be closer, because it’s more specific than green, and our brain can definitively switch automatically to get this nuance in language, as soon as we asses that “great dragons” are a thing. It’s not about size and color in itself, it’s just that, generally speaking, size tends to be less specific than color in subgrouping a noun. This is also how we learn though trust: if I find the sentence and I trust who wrote that, I assume and therefore learn that Great Dragons are probably a breed of dragons.
- Wiles_7 6y agoThat specific example probably originates from Tolkien. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography: > When [Tolkien] was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon. ‘I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,’ he recalled. ‘My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon”, but had to say “a great green dragon”. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.’
- camillomiller 6y agoInteresting find! Thanks
- StavrosK 6y ago"Can't exist" doesn't mean "there's no way to make a valid sentence out of those words", it means "it'll sound wrong to native speakers". I remember the scientific paper that included the phrase "I smoke crack rocks" in the sentence "we observed vaporized iodide (I) erosion on soil in an experiment where we saw I smoke crack rocks.
- mellosouls 6y agoThis is not a valid counter example. "Great" is capitalised here (in Great Dane) as it is now part of the name of the breed, rather than an adjective, whatever its origin.
- signal11 6y agoThe thing with English grammar is that it's very malleable. And exception-ridden. In this particular case, the specificity of what you're describing is important as well. > absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife For instance, "An expensive, peaty fifteen year old Scotch" is a potential counter-example, because [fifteen year old scotch] is the specific item you're talking about. "Barman, a peaty large|double Scotch for me please" would also be a counterexample, I think, because the key here is that you want a [large|double Scotch]. Large and Double are both size descriptors for a bar drink in different parts of the world. And I'm not seeing why "I received a hand-painted wooden Native-American jewellery box as a present" would somehow be wrong, if I wanted to emphasize the origin, over "I received a hand-painted Native-American wooden jewellery box as a present".
- tgv 6y agoAnd Scotch too is an adjective, of origin. But since you never separate it from the head noun (the omitted whiskey), it will always come last. Writing grammar rules is obsessing over a few phrases, and declaring everything that doesn't follow the pattern you've found in those an exception.
- nemo44x 6y agoI feel like “wooden” sounds more natural before “hand-painted”.
- Cerium 6y agoAgreed, but following the rule produces a good sentence. These adjectives are only origin and material, so "a Native American hand painted wooden jewelry box" seems perfectly fine to me.
- air7 6y agoThis illustrates that we teach languages "wrong" or rather that we don't take advantage of the innate part of the brain that children use to learn their primary language. My pet theory is that it isn't a decline of brain ability but rather a psychological shift: Adults expect results, get frustrated more quickly, can't tolerate speaking "silly" for long etc.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoYes. I think learning rules is mostly helpful to bootstrap you enough to be able to pick things up naturally, and to enable you to use dictionaries and analyse your mistakes.
- svara 6y ago> My pet theory is that it isn't a decline of brain ability but rather a psychological shift: Adults expect results, get frustrated more quickly, can't tolerate speaking "silly" for long etc. Totally agree. An adult working full time on acquiring a language can learn to use a foreign language at an adult level within maybe a year or so. It's just that nobody does that, because there are other things to do... Children literally need decades to reach an adult level of competence in their native language, despite 24/7 immersion. Language learning techniques for adults (studying abstract grammar, cramming vocabulary) are very effective and kids don't learn the way. There is one major disadvantage that adults have though, and that's at acquiring correct pronunciation. I think I've never met a person in my life who didn't learn a language from a very young age and who didn't sound slightly off to a native speaker. There might be the rare exceptional talent who can do that, but to a first approximation it's not possible as an adult anymore.
- yorwba 6y ago> An adult working full time on acquiring a language can learn to use a foreign language at an adult level within maybe a year or so. It's just that nobody does that, because there are other things to do... ... > There is one major disadvantage that adults have though, and that's at acquiring correct pronunciation. I think I've never met a person in my life who didn't learn a language from a very young age and who didn't sound slightly off to a native speaker. I think an adult working full-time on their pronunciation would get within the native range of variation fairly quickly. Even native speakers only adjust their accent very slowly after moving to a new area, but accent coaches can speed up that process a lot. It's just that it involves a lot of tedious practice consciously controlling your tongue when you'd rather just speak freely and have your subconscious take care of tongue movement. So most people who do that are actors or public speakers, for whom pronunciation matters a great deal. The average language learner has better things to do...
- eps 6y agoThis one is trivial to learn by example and by reading through a lot of books. What's an absolutely fucking black magic is the use of articles. The frivolity with which a's and the's are sprinkled through an average sentence is genuinely infuriating. There are rules, but "they are more like guidelines". In reality asking native speakers why they used the here, but not there typically draws blank looks. Having used English daily for over 20 years I still have to resort to A/B testing the placement (or not placement!) of articles in my head and check which option sounds "more English."
- laurieg 6y agoOr you can side step the issue by avoiding chaining together long lists of adjectives. You're spot on with the articles though. When coming from a language like Japanese that doesn't have articles the using "a" and "the" correctly is maddening.
- inglor_cz 6y agoSo is for most Slavic people. Only Bulgarian has definite articles.
- davidgay 6y agoAnd, on the general theme, the Bulgarian rules for using definite articles are closer to the French rather than to the English rules (I'm fluent in French and English, learning Bulgarian ;)). I'm not going to try for a Bulgarian example of the difference, but here's an English vs French one "A Paris, les oranges ont l'air ..." "In Paris, oranges appear ..." One could possibly add a definite article to the English sentence, but one definitely cannot remove it from the French one.
- tsimionescu 6y agoI'm not a linguist, but I believe there is a direct relation between the French article and the Bulgarian one - Bulgarian articles are characteristic of the Balkan sprachbund[0], likely influenced by medieval Romanian, a romance language. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThis “rule” seems about as made up as “one can't end sentences on an adpositional” to me. Adjectives in other orders are constantly encountered as produced by native speakers.
- soVeryTired 6y agoSo if it's "opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose noun", why would you say "the big bad wolf", but also "the bad old days"? In the latter, 'bad' is acting as opinion. But what's it doing in the former? Purpose?
- signal11 6y agoI believe the correct answer is related to specificity, ie what is most important to what you’re communicating. To borrow some parentheses, (the big (bad wolf)) highlights the character of the wolf as being more important than it’s shape. However (the smelly (bad meat)) emphasises the bad-ness, or rotten-ness, of the meat and further describes it as smelly. Similarly the focus of (the bad (old days)) the past, and bad is acting as an adjective for (old days).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMore complexity: add commas, and you get to have more than one adjective phrase. That is a larger 8-by-10, early 1800's, lower New York, broken green whittling table.
- tpoacher 6y agoI largely disagree with the universality attributed to this 'rule'. It's just that different 'groupings' are usually less useful. E.g. it is far less likely that you'd want to specify that the "green knife" entity is to be used for whittling. It is far more likely that you'd want to specify that the "whittling knife" is green. Similarly you're unlikely to group 'lovely knife' as the most low-level entity to which you'd add higher leverl characterisations. Some of the other ones though are reasonably interchangeable, as long as it is understood that the focus is slightly different each time. E.g. a priceless old knife, and old priceless knife mean slightly different things, and you'd choose the order depending on whether you wanted to emphasize that the old knife happens to be priceless, as opposed to that the priceless knife happens to be old.
- SamBam 6y agoExactly. I tend to think of it as relating to how tightly the adjective is bound to the word. The first adjective before the noun modifies the noun the most. The adjective before modifies that tuple. The adjective before that modifies that group, etc. "Hand me the green knife." / "Which one? There are two: one metal and one plastic." / "The metal green knife." "Hand me the metal knife." / "Which one? There are two: one green and one blue." / "The green metal knife."
- d1sxeyes 6y agoFor me "the metal green knife" just sounds weird. I'd just say "the metal one". I can't think of an example in which "the metal green knife" sounds natural.
- selimthegrim 6y agoIf you are describing quality of the color “metallic green knife” - like the car in My Cousin Vinny for example
- selimthegrim 6y agoMetallic mint green to be pedantic
- gweinberg 6y ago" he dismantles the commonly held English spelling mantra ”I before E except after C.” It’s used to help people remember how to spell words like “piece,” but, Forsyth says, there are only 44 words that follow the rule, and 923 that don’t. His prime examples? “Their,” “being,” and “eight.”" But of course, the rule is "i before e except after c or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh". You still have exceptions like seize and weird (and being) but I think that's all among common words.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> You still have exceptions like seize and weird (and being) but I think that's all among common words. My favorite demonstation of the silliness of the rule: ‘i’ before ‘e’ except when your foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird.
- Izkata 6y agoThe rule is also meant for words where it's not clear because the two letters make one sound, not the ones where the "e" and "i" make distinct sounds, so that drops out another good chunk of these exceptions.
- dariosalvi78 6y agounexpected? I learned this as part of my CAE exam.