10 ms·
One thing that is a bit amazing to me is that there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe, but do subconsciousl
by 542458 5y ago
One thing that is a bit amazing to me is that there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe, but do subconsciously anyways. Things like the order of adjectives (“big red ball” sounds right, “red big ball” sounds wrong) are surprisingly complicated [1], but we passively learn them at a young age.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
- eru 5y agoAbout the 'red big ball': you can use that, but the weirdness itself suggests that you better mean something different than an ordinary big red ball with that phrase. Also interesting and surprisingly rule-bound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation
- jpxw 5y ago> Although most speakers are not exposed to these formations until after childhood,[citation needed] Lol at “citation needed”
- SilasX 5y ago“Give me one of the big balls.” <gives purple ball> “Wait, I actually need a red big ball.”
- treeman79 5y agoGave giant balls two pink to kids. One was slightly larger then the other. Life Lesson, either both must be identical, or don’t get.
- msbarnett 5y agoit works but even then, “no sorry, I decided I need the big red ball” feels more natural to me.
- presentation 5y agoOr if a "Big Ball" is a thing, like a brand name lol.
- SilasX 5y agoExactly. My personal hunch is that the supposed "required ordering" of adjectives isn't real, and the real "rule" is related to the tightness by which the adjectives are bound to the noun -- least separable go last. It's just that, in practice the semantic tightness corresponds to that rule. In the extreme case (like you gave) where "BigBall(tm)" is an irreducible thing it itself, then of course "big" goes last.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoThats seems more like a arbitrary cultural distinction versus a rule. It sounds odd, but a half second of thought should make it obvious it makes perfect sense.
- eru 5y agoWhat's the difference between 'arbitrary cultural distinction' and 'rule of a language'?
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoRADAR vs radar. Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bobthepanda 5y agoThe dictionaries we have (Oxford, Merriam-Webster etc.) are all descriptive rather than prescriptive.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y agoI mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't. Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc. Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.
- lupire 5y ago> understand specific usages within a time-limited context That sounds descriptive to me.
- thechao 5y agoYeah; I first heard about this from a German speaker who was complaining about it. He said that you could mangle 99% of English Grammar — no problem. But! you get the order-of-adjectives slightly wrong, and a native English speaker will look at you like you're from Mars. His second complaint is that the rule is rarely taught to native English speakers, such that they (we) don't even know how hard of a rule it is.
- seppel 5y agoGerman has more as less exactly the same order in which adjectives are sorted (unless you want to put stress on any particular adjective).
- marcosdumay 5y agoThat's a problem itself already. On a lot of languages, the order of the words can change a lot depending on what you want to stress, but English gives you very little leeway. Thus if you try to apply your skill of ordering the words right to express yourself, you will fail almost every time.
- kleton 5y agoAll languages have either exactly the same adjective order as English, or exactly reversed.
- obloid 5y agoI've recently been listening to the "History of English Podcast". It's a deep dive into the evolution of the English language starting from its PIE roots onward. He does a great job explaining how many of the the odd rules of English came about. Highly recommended if you're into that kind of thing.
- Tagbert 5y ago"History of English Podcast" is fantastic look at both language and the historic and cultural events that impact the language. “Lexicon Valley” is another language focused podcast that looks at how our use of language has changed over time.
- eternauta3k 5y agoBoth are excellent podcasts. I personally prefer the early Lexicon Valley episodes with the original hosts, although I hear the new host has more credentials.
- gumby 5y agoThis is true of every language.
- foobiekr 5y agoI took 4+ years of Japanese and was once nearly fluent; I never came across an equivalent there; the closest I can think of is an emphasis rule, which is not at all what's going on in English. Spanish (several years) seems very loose compared to english, but I agree it shows up there in a way that I never quite nailed (e.g., "el frio hielo"). I am curious if you can point to some article about this being a universal.
- gumby 5y agoI didn't mean the stress issue (stress in Japanese is a completely different matter anyway) but the general principle of complex-to-write-down "rules" that are not taught explicitly to native speakers but which people automatically adopt. Classifiers are a common example; words are often taught with classifiers (in most IE languages, gender) but you pick up words in reading or speech and automatically absorb the appropriate classifier even if not used, from other syntactic agreements. Japanese of course has a richer set than gender. In another case: German, how you compose compound words (and far more interesting to me, how you read unfamiliar ones at a glance rather than parsing them as a student would) uses rules that just "feel obvious" after a while. You a fast learner. It usually takes me several years of daily, primary use of a language before these kinds of things are intuitive.
- Clewza313 5y agoThe basic order seems similar in Japanese as well though, although it's a lot more loose. A big red ball would default to ookina akai booru. Akakute ookii booru isn't wrong, but it shifts the emphasis to "red" over "big". Then again, Japanese adjectives don't behave very much English adjectives, keiyoushi (-i) conjugate much like verbs while keiyoudoushi (-na) are basically nouns with syntactic glue tacked on.
- presentation 5y ago
- Razengan 5y ago> there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe It’s especially annoying when English natives arrogantly deride other languages for being too complicated or ambiguous. Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”)
- chimeracoder 5y ago> Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”) That's hardly unique to English. Heck, even in German, there are at least four ways to pronounce the letter "s".
- Razengan 5y agoThat’s pretty much the point.
- loceng 5y agoWell, evolutionary-hierarchy perspective wise colour would be the best/simplest identifier and ideal to be first.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 5y agoI'll bet a lot of them aren't even rules, just conventions. I mean, there might not be a governing intelligent abstraction there. Just inertia.
- cecilpl2 5y agoReposting a comment I wrote a couple days which surprisingly is on-topic once again! Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it! If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker. Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
- gerdesj 5y ago"lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife" These are the groupings of those adjectives that make soundly sense to me: lovely, little, old rectangular, green, French silver, whittling knife (final noun) You can mix up all the adjectives and still get the meaning but it does sound wrong. The example you give causes me to try to create the word "Frenchly" (an adverb) to fix it up. I think that we would not normally try to describe an object in one stream of adjectives like that. I think we have a series of sets of adjectives that are deployed as required. Attempting to come up with a final rule that covers all eventualities is unlikely to work. I've got a lovely little old French whittling knife. It's made of silver yet green in colour due to [something]. It is rectangular which is a right old pain when cutting [something]. There is a set of rules here somewhere but it isn't quite as simple as all English adjectives can be deployed as: "opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose."
- egeozcan 5y agonormally Turkish grammar is a world apart from the English grammar but somehow this one fits 100%. büyük kırmızı top ("big red ball") sounds right, kırmızı büyük top ("red big ball") sounds wrong (feels like "red" is describing the word "big", nor sure why).