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Yeah; 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 g

Yeah; 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 ago
German 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 ago
  That'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 ago
All languages have either exactly the same adjective order as English, or exactly reversed.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  > All languages This would amaze me. How sure you are about this? Or do you mean something like "all languages I speak"?
  - kleton 5y ago
    Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases Gary-John Scott (2002)
    - sinkasapa 5y ago
      Speaking as a linguist, Cartography, the theory espoused by this work, is a highly controversial approach. The claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It isn't a statement of fact but an argument for a hypothesis that has not been thoroughly tested using a rigorous empirical methodology. I am a linguist who works in the field, performing basic research on languages that have very little documentation. I am aware of how tentative initial grammars of many of the world's languages are because I am involved in writing them myself. These works are the primary data that most linguistic theorists tend to use when making broad typological claims, i.e. claims about all languages. Theoretical works like Gary-John Scott are essentially meta-studies, secondary reinterpretations of primary research. This is fine for generating hypotheses but it is not valid to claim that a grammar, itself, is truth. Grammars, themselves, are essentially theories. They may be very preliminary. My point is that there is a telephone game aspect to these types of works at any point in the chain from native speaker to typologist errors, biases and misrepresentations may have occurred. Additionally, it is important to realize that the methods used in primary linguistic research are underdeveloped. The following paper, which is still in press, outlines some of the empirical issues faced by linguists researching understudied languages: Empirical evidence in research on meaning, Tonhauser and Matthewson: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730.2636&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730... One thing that someone with a science background may find surprising is that the methodological suggestions made by the authors are so modest. They include the notion that one should control the context in which a stimulus is provided, that one should have a clearly stated hypothesis when eliciting linguistic judgments and also clearly state what question was put to the speaker. Sadly, these are controversial in linguistic research, indicating just how underdeveloped many areas of our discipline are. Gary-John Scott might happen to be right (I doubt it) but if so, it is not because they have made their case scientifically. They have only provided sufficient evidence to motivate a hypothesis.
      - erdevs 5y ago
        Does the hypothesis in question seem to hold for, say, the world's top 10 languages (by, say, # of living fluent speakers globally)? Top 30? I'm genuinely curious. And also trying to discern whether your point is that many-- but not necessarily _all_-- current languages seem to conform to this hypothesis, or that actually very few seem to.
- presentation 5y ago
  I've been speaking Japanese for years and while I've been told my Japanese is messed up in many different ways, adjective order has never been one of them. As far as I'm aware, the ordering is much more based on what you wish to emphasize than any set order.
taneq 5y ago
On the flip side, German is (in my limited experience) super picky about pronunciation in general. You ask directions to ‘Kaiserslauten’ and they’ll look at you like you’re bonkers. Ask for KaiserslautERn and they’ll say “aaah, KaiserslautERn!” That slight destressing of the fourth syllable is enough to completely fox them.
- jackewiehose 5y ago
  > super picky about pronunciation No I don't think so, we have to deal with a lot of annoying dialects ;-) In that example it's not the pronunciation, "Kaiserslauten" is just wrong. It's like saying "New Yok" or "Hong Kog".
  - taneq 5y ago
    That's precisely what I mean, though. If you're in the U.S. and someone asks you "where is New Yok?" you would have no issue knowing what they're talking about. The English languages gets so mangled so frequently by so many different nationalities that we're used to dealing with that sort of thing.
    - jackewiehose 5y ago
      yes, I guess someone has just been very pedantic. Normally "Kaiserslauten" should be understood too.
  - samatman 5y ago
    Ironically, if someone says "New Yok", it's more likely that they're from New York! (this is usually spelled "New Yawk" when writing dialect)

seppel 5y ago

German 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 ago
That'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 ago

All languages have either exactly the same adjective order as English, or exactly reversed.

skrebbel 5y ago
> All languages This would amaze me. How sure you are about this? Or do you mean something like "all languages I speak"?
- kleton 5y ago
  Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases Gary-John Scott (2002)
  - sinkasapa 5y ago
    Speaking as a linguist, Cartography, the theory espoused by this work, is a highly controversial approach. The claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It isn't a statement of fact but an argument for a hypothesis that has not been thoroughly tested using a rigorous empirical methodology. I am a linguist who works in the field, performing basic research on languages that have very little documentation. I am aware of how tentative initial grammars of many of the world's languages are because I am involved in writing them myself. These works are the primary data that most linguistic theorists tend to use when making broad typological claims, i.e. claims about all languages. Theoretical works like Gary-John Scott are essentially meta-studies, secondary reinterpretations of primary research. This is fine for generating hypotheses but it is not valid to claim that a grammar, itself, is truth. Grammars, themselves, are essentially theories. They may be very preliminary. My point is that there is a telephone game aspect to these types of works at any point in the chain from native speaker to typologist errors, biases and misrepresentations may have occurred. Additionally, it is important to realize that the methods used in primary linguistic research are underdeveloped. The following paper, which is still in press, outlines some of the empirical issues faced by linguists researching understudied languages: Empirical evidence in research on meaning, Tonhauser and Matthewson: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730.2636&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730... One thing that someone with a science background may find surprising is that the methodological suggestions made by the authors are so modest. They include the notion that one should control the context in which a stimulus is provided, that one should have a clearly stated hypothesis when eliciting linguistic judgments and also clearly state what question was put to the speaker. Sadly, these are controversial in linguistic research, indicating just how underdeveloped many areas of our discipline are. Gary-John Scott might happen to be right (I doubt it) but if so, it is not because they have made their case scientifically. They have only provided sufficient evidence to motivate a hypothesis.
    - erdevs 5y ago
      Does the hypothesis in question seem to hold for, say, the world's top 10 languages (by, say, # of living fluent speakers globally)? Top 30? I'm genuinely curious. And also trying to discern whether your point is that many-- but not necessarily _all_-- current languages seem to conform to this hypothesis, or that actually very few seem to.
presentation 5y ago
I've been speaking Japanese for years and while I've been told my Japanese is messed up in many different ways, adjective order has never been one of them. As far as I'm aware, the ordering is much more based on what you wish to emphasize than any set order.

taneq 5y ago

On the flip side, German is (in my limited experience) super picky about pronunciation in general. You ask directions to ‘Kaiserslauten’ and they’ll look at you like you’re bonkers. Ask for KaiserslautERn and they’ll say “aaah, KaiserslautERn!” That slight destressing of the fourth syllable is enough to completely fox them.

jackewiehose 5y ago
> super picky about pronunciation No I don't think so, we have to deal with a lot of annoying dialects ;-) In that example it's not the pronunciation, "Kaiserslauten" is just wrong. It's like saying "New Yok" or "Hong Kog".
- taneq 5y ago
  That's precisely what I mean, though. If you're in the U.S. and someone asks you "where is New Yok?" you would have no issue knowing what they're talking about. The English languages gets so mangled so frequently by so many different nationalities that we're used to dealing with that sort of thing.
  - jackewiehose 5y ago
    yes, I guess someone has just been very pedantic. Normally "Kaiserslauten" should be understood too.
- samatman 5y ago
  Ironically, if someone says "New Yok", it's more likely that they're from New York! (this is usually spelled "New Yawk" when writing dialect)