"lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife" These are the groupings of those adjectives that make soundly sense to me: lovely, little,

"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."