4 ms·

Reposting 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, sh

Reposting 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."

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."