12 ms·

Why Do We Say “Big Red Barn,” But “Red Big Barn” Sounds Wrong?

188 points by tokenadult 12y ago

tspiteri 12y ago
Red Big Barn does not always sound wrong to me. If there are ten big barns and ten small barns, and one of the big barns is red, I would call it the red big barn, not the big red barn. But if there is just one isolated barn, and it is red and big, then red big barn does sound weird to me.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  That is specifically addressed in the article. As Partee points out, switching up the order of adjectives allows you to redistribute emphasis. (If you wish to buy the black small purse, not the gray one, for instance, you can communicate your priorities by placing color before size).
  - pimlottc 12y ago
    I found that example odd, as I would find it just as natural to emphasis the second adjective. > No, the small black purse, not the small gray purse.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- sabbatic13 12y ago
  That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible emphasis on red.
  - barkingcat 12y ago
    Yes rhythm and speed of reading matters too. A writer and poet also has that in their toolbox.
    - jfarmer 12y ago
      If you're interested in the linguistic term, it's "prosody."
- barkingcat 12y ago
  red big barn is not wrong - it depends on emphasis. Writers use these types of manipulations to change the meaning.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
  I read it as 'the Red "Big Barn"'.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
digisth 12y ago
There's a good post about this subject on the English SE: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-... It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top answer, which I enjoyed: "I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother once famously corrected him at a very early age when he said ‘a green great dragon’. She told him that it had to be ‘a great green dragon’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t answer, thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and philologic his whole life long."
- adolph 12y ago
  I wonder if Margaret Wise Brown knew that as she placed the big red barn by the great green field?
  - pcrh 12y ago
    Wise Brown Margaret?
- Swizec 12y ago
  Doesn't "a great green dragon" have a different meaning than "a great green dragon" though? The former implies "green dragon" is the name/species of dragon, which happens to be big/great. Whereas the latter just means a big/great dragon, which is green.
  - dfxm12 12y ago
    I don't think the language itself implies any of that. That's just our brains inferring something about the blanks for us when there is a lack of context. I mean, if you were reading a book, a good author might go into detail about how "great dragons" or "green dragons" are a different species from "dragons" before using both in long chains of adjectives. Maybe it is left ambiguous on purpose, just to exercise the reader's imagination.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
rthomas6 12y ago
What if it has something to do with the adjectives that are most important/specific? Suppose I were categorizing my big barns by color, but not my little barns (Nobody cares about the little barns). My red big barn is pretty standard, but my green big barn is hard to see because it's camouflaged.
- mratzloff 12y ago
  Again, this is covered by the article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338.
mratzloff 12y ago
Interesting subject that I hadn't thought much about, but the cutesy writing in the beginning almost stopped me from finishing. Fortunately I did finish, as the meat of the article is farther down. In summary, it turns out that we subconsciously order adjectives, most likely by intrinsic quality. That order is "general opinion or quality ('exquisite,' 'terrible'), specific opinion or quality ('friendly,' 'dusty'), size, shape, age, color, origin, and material."
sophacles 12y ago
Im curious if anyone has looked at examples of writing that have short sentences or phrases around the adjectives for example: When I was a child we would visit grandma's farm. There was a barn there I loved to explore. It was big, it was red, it smelled of hay and had been abandoned for years. vs The big red hay-scented abandoned barn. And if the phrases follow the ordering rules as much as strings of adjectives. Further, if there was a strong correlation, what would that say to us about language and maybe even brain structure? It would be interesting as well to know if that construct, which comes to mind as a way to highlight intentionally out of order adjectives, is actually used that way commonly or I'm just cherry picking random examples in my head.
JshWright 12y ago
Interesting that when Tom Scott did a (great) video on this topic back in December, he used "Big Red" as his example as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Why does "large red barn" sound wrong, despite the supposed synonymic status of "big" and "large"? Or, if it doesn't sound wrong, why does it tend to give the impression of a very different meaning? I don't think there are such things as pure synonyms, and I also don't believe that "big" and "red" are distinct adjectives in the headline phrase. Rather, they have formed a new "adjective phrase" that has new meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the individual words. This isn't so strange, the words themselves have more meaning than the sum of the letters' meaning. Thus if you say "red big barn", not only are you avoiding the meaning of the more orthodox phrase, you're showing off that you're not describing it the way others do. If I called a red balloon green, you'd point that out too and think I spoke funny. Same thing here. "Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world, in a certain era. Surely if we were to find some large cattle shack in the Scottish highlands and paint it red, it would fail to become a "big red barn". Or if we found some Sound-of-Music-esque farm building in Switzerland and we diligently painted it, that too would fail to become a "big red barn". The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.
- barkingcat 12y ago
  It's because inventive language use is dying. Imagine if Dr. Seuss tried to write something today. The big book publishers wouldn't even take a second look at his stuff.
  - vlunkr 12y ago
    I don't know about that, his books are still being constantly re-published.
  - grahamburger 12y ago
    The publishers of his time didn't take a second look, either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss#Early_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss#Early_career
  - sambeau 12y ago
    If you wander around the children's department of a book shop (especially here in the UK) you would soon realise what a ridiculous statement that is. I was in Waterston's children's department (UK bookseller chain) this weekend and found myself amazed at the sheer diversity of kids books. There was a multitude of amazing kids titles full of bonkers ideas and fascinating fun prose (a lot of it made up of made up words and interesting sounds). There were also weird and wonderful illustrations to join them. Myself and my kids browsed and laughed and (in one case - 'Goodbye Mog' - cried (although the language of the book is traditional, the subject matter - death - was unusual for a kids book)). lemony Snicker is also a case of inventive ideas rather than inventive language. But we picked up all sorts of weird books with strange language and big colourful pictures. I came back impressed thinking that the kids book market was in a healthy imaginative state and wishing I went to 'rea'l book shops more often — you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.
wyager 12y ago
That's interesting. I was reading about Lojban the other day, and I was thinking to myself that the placement of "sumti" around a given "selbri" was complicated to remember. For example, the word "vecnu" (meaning "sell" in English) is used like this: x1 x2 vecnu x3 where x1 is the seller, x2 is the good being sold, and x3 is the buyer. But I guess now that I think about it, English is just as full of arbitrary ordering rules, even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3".
- gioele 12y ago
  > even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3". indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him". I've never seen that kind of construction used except by very young children or non-native English speakers coming from languages where the role of the prepositions would instead be served by inflecting the noun or pronoun. I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English, insofar as "required" means anything in a natural language.
    - delluminatus 12y ago
      Sure you have. Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Sure you have. I'd rather you not try to speak for my experience, since clearly you have no basis for doing so. In any case, you are wrong, possibly because you are confusing two different constructions for the same construction. > Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to him." That's not the same construction as "She sold it him" in place of "She sold it to him"; its a different construction in which changes to word order conveys the same relationship that is conveyed by prepositions in the form with preopositions. The same construction would be "I told that him". There's a difference between being able to simply drop the prepositions and with there being an alternative mechanism of using word order to replace the prepositions.
joelberman 12y ago
Not the same, but in the same vein this blog caught my attention. http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finni... Complex rules that just seem natural.
dfxm12 12y ago
Is "big red" the best example to use? We might be primed to thinking "big red" is correct because I've seen/read/heard it in other contexts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink)
- pixelcort 12y ago
  Hmm, but also "small green frog" vs "green small frog".
  - dsuth 12y ago
    It works in that context too. It would have to be a Small Frog (proper noun) to make sense as "green Small frog". What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D
- baddox 12y ago
  And also Clifford the Big Red Dog.
tokenadult 12y ago
I was a bit disappointed that this article focused on "pure" adjectives without mentioning demonstrative and possessive modifiers. I learned about adjective order differences between languages way back in the 1970s when I took my first course in linguistics. These differences can be quite striking between noncognate languages like English and Chinese. Both in English and in Chinese, most grammatical relationships in sentences are communicated by word order rather than by inflection of words. But the word order rules can differ, particularly in the order of demonstrative versus possessive modifiers of nouns (what we call "adjectives" in English). In English, it is very anomalous to say * "my that book," as the standard word order would be "that book of mine," but in Chinese it is expected to say, "我的那本書," which corresponds to the anomalous word order in English. And so on for most phrases like those contrasted between English and Chinese. One thing that gives native speakers of Chinese an "accent" in English, besides phonology, is grammar differences like that, and of course the same is true when a native speaker of English speaks Chinese as a second language.
- camillomiller 12y ago
  The same for Italians. We do not use nouns as modifiers, except for some specific situations. You can easily spot an Italian (or some other romance-language native speaker) for his/her resistance to adjectivization. That, and the over-abundant use of terms derived from Latin (wouldn't have "latin-derived terms" sounded more anglosaxon?).
- devonkim 12y ago
  I was thinking something similar but along a different line of thought using English alone. Possessive modifiers behave differently than other "pure" adjectives and whether it's anaphors. 1) Jim's red barn 1a) My red barn 2) Red Jim's barn (Not awkward like in the headline example, but the meaning has changed completely) 2b) * Red my barn (invalid, period. even if my -> mine - I can do this word order in Korean or Japanese easily due to more explicit case marking) We have to start using some syntactic movement to make the construct syntactically acceptable and semantically natural and equivalent, but doing so makes it possible to be free with word order: 3) Jim's barn that is red 3a) My barn that is red 4) Red barn that is Jim's 4a) Red barn that is mine (my -> mine) 5) Barn that is red and Jim's 5a) Barn that is red and mine 6) Barn that is Jim's and red 6a) Barn that is mine and red The preferences aren't as clear-cut to me as in the headline clause, but we'd rather keep the possessive separate from the pure adjective (3-4 > 5-6, higher is more natural). Using only "pure" adjectives, it looks like the semantic binding preference still sticks though: 7) Big red barn => 7a) Red barn that is big 7b) Big barn that is red 7c) Barn that is red and big 7d) Barn that is big and red Naturalness: 7b > 7a and 7d > 7c. And since 7d > 7b, we have 7d > 7c >= 7b 7a. I'm thinking 7b > 7c but wasn't quite sure because both sound awkward and comparing two mildly awkward clauses is probably not valid here. But hopefully other native speakers roughly agree on the precedence of awkwardness with me and understand why this article is just the tip of the iceberg.
slipperyp 12y ago
Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added): "...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code governs..." Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something, where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" - that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just curious...
- allochthon 12y ago
  This is a recent usage, or even meme -- "because science," etc. She's no doubt using "because" ironically. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...
  - slipperyp 12y ago
    Many thanks - that's exactly the discussion I was looking for :)
- bobbles 12y ago
  http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...
- ineedtosleep 12y ago
  I would take a guess that it is type of Ellipsis[1] -- more specifically, Answer ellipsis[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_ellipsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_ellipsis EDIT: Keep in mind, I was writing this response before links to the Atlantic were posted (which I haven't read yet).
- jamt9000 12y ago
stevenbedrick 12y ago
In case anybody's interested in an application of machine learning to this problem area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287
goldfeld 12y ago
I can see it going the other way around depending on the emphasis of the narrative. For example, if I were to say "Oh, it was a big, red barn", that sounds wrong, because "red" isn't something you'd usually emphasize. Whereas "It was a red, big barn!" sounds good.
bramvanleur 12y ago
The font property in CSS requires me to say "italic large serif" instead of "large italic serif" which sounds wrong too. Now I know why.
jpswade 12y ago
The English language is a nonsense. For example, “Black box”: In French this would be called a “boîte noire” or literally a “box black”. This seems more logical as first you identify that it is a box you are looking for, secondly that it is black.
- lelag 12y ago
  It's a strange choice to choose the french language as a example over this matter when it's even worse. Adjectives can be placed in front or after a word and you also have to guess instinctively which is right. Ex : "Un grand homme" (a great man) "Un homme grand" (a tall man) Both are valid but don't mean the same thing. Source : I'm french.
  - jpswade 12y ago
    My example used literal translations, so for example: https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man a great man => un grand homme https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man a tall man => un grand homme In both of these examples, the ordering is the same as English. So yes by that logic, you're right, French is equal to or worse than English.
  - MBCook 12y ago
    > and you also have to guess instinctively which is right When I was learning French in school I was taught that the adjectives that go before nouns are the BANGS adjectives: Beauty Age Number Goodness Size. So words like tall, big , small, young old, or many are put before the noun while things like color go after. I'm sure there are counter examples (I only took French for a few years) but it seemed to work very well as a rule of thumb for guessing if you didn't know.
- GarvielLoken 12y ago
  Yeah! I found the article a bit shallow since it only discussed English like forms. Spanish has the same things "perro Grande" <==> "Dog Big". And has adjective bending forms on nouns, "perrito" <==> "small dog", "cafecito" <==> "little coffe". Disclaimer, I am only learning Spanish, not native speaker.
beardyw 12y ago
“varnished blistered wood” describes wood which is blistered, if such a thing can happen, whereas “blistered varnished wood” says the varnish is blistered which makes more sense. Just a poor example I think.
- IneffablePigeon 12y ago
  Your example is an exception to the rule, though. Usually, two adjectives don't modify each other. In fact, I find your second example a bit ambiguous because of that very fact -- it could mean that the varnish is blistered or that the wood is blistered. The first seems to make more sense in terms of semantics, and the second seems to make more sense in terms of grammar.
razzaj 12y ago
while "bad little dog" sounds better than "little bad dog", "big bad dog" sounds better than "bad big dog". I wonder if that means that we might be subconsciously interpreting strings from right to left, and in that sense: Little(bad(dog)) would represent less our intended meaning than bad(little(dog)). Whereas Big(bad(dog)) would intuitively enhance our meaning when compared to bad(big(dog)).
zeteo 12y ago
I doubt there's any set rule but it seems to depend on strength of association. For example it's natural to say "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. Another case where "big" has a stronger association than color would be "white big brother". On the other hand "red barn" has its own strong association [1]. Hypothetically if we lived in a community of farmers where "big barn" and "small barn" were structures with very different purposes (but color didn't matter much), it may be possible to conceive of "red big barn" instead. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  > "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. That's because "big toe" is a compound noun that refers to one of your innermost toes only. "big red toe" and "red big toe" mean different things. The set of things they could refer to is different. In your barn example the same thing is true.
  - zeteo 12y ago
    I see your point about the compound noun, but is there something in between when we care more about size than color? I'm thinking of a phrase like "we all went fishing and caught little fish, except for John who caught a black-striped big fish". Does this sound natural to anyone else?
JoshTheGeek 12y ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M
mcovey 12y ago
In French some adjectives come after the noun, some come before, and even though my French is not that great, I know enough for some reason to have that gut feeling that "le grand rouge <noun>" sounds weird, and it should be "le grand <noun> rouge". Interesting how even with a second language these habits become ingrained.

188 points by tokenadult 12y ago

Red Big Barn does not always sound wrong to me. If there are ten big barns and ten small barns, and one of the big barns is red, I would call it the red big barn, not the big red barn. But if there is just one isolated barn, and it is red and big, then red big barn does sound weird to me.

mratzloff 12y ago
That is specifically addressed in the article. As Partee points out, switching up the order of adjectives allows you to redistribute emphasis. (If you wish to buy the black small purse, not the gray one, for instance, you can communicate your priorities by placing color before size).
- pimlottc 12y ago
  I found that example odd, as I would find it just as natural to emphasis the second adjective. > No, the small black purse, not the small gray purse.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sabbatic13 12y ago
That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would be to change the rhythm and speed of the phrase slightly and put an audible emphasis on red.
- barkingcat 12y ago
  Yes rhythm and speed of reading matters too. A writer and poet also has that in their toolbox.
  - jfarmer 12y ago
    If you're interested in the linguistic term, it's "prosody."
barkingcat 12y ago
red big barn is not wrong - it depends on emphasis. Writers use these types of manipulations to change the meaning.
hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
I read it as 'the Red "Big Barn"'.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

digisth 12y ago

There's a good post about this subject on the English SE: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-... It goes into some other theories on AOR (Adjective Ordering Restrictions) and I'd recommend it if you find the subject interesting. A quote from the top answer, which I enjoyed: "I am reminded of how J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother once famously corrected him at a very early age when he said ‘a green great dragon’. She told him that it had to be ‘a great green dragon’, but when he asked her why, she couldn’t answer, thereby starting him down the road of puzzling over matters linguistic and philologic his whole life long."

adolph 12y ago
I wonder if Margaret Wise Brown knew that as she placed the big red barn by the great green field?
- pcrh 12y ago
  Wise Brown Margaret?
Swizec 12y ago
Doesn't "a great green dragon" have a different meaning than "a great green dragon" though? The former implies "green dragon" is the name/species of dragon, which happens to be big/great. Whereas the latter just means a big/great dragon, which is green.
- dfxm12 12y ago
  I don't think the language itself implies any of that. That's just our brains inferring something about the blanks for us when there is a lack of context. I mean, if you were reading a book, a good author might go into detail about how "great dragons" or "green dragons" are a different species from "dragons" before using both in long chains of adjectives. Maybe it is left ambiguous on purpose, just to exercise the reader's imagination.
- anigbrowl 12y ago

rthomas6 12y ago

What if it has something to do with the adjectives that are most important/specific? Suppose I were categorizing my big barns by color, but not my little barns (Nobody cares about the little barns). My red big barn is pretty standard, but my green big barn is hard to see because it's camouflaged.

mratzloff 12y ago
Again, this is covered by the article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8194338.

mratzloff 12y ago

Interesting subject that I hadn't thought much about, but the cutesy writing in the beginning almost stopped me from finishing. Fortunately I did finish, as the meat of the article is farther down. In summary, it turns out that we subconsciously order adjectives, most likely by intrinsic quality. That order is "general opinion or quality ('exquisite,' 'terrible'), specific opinion or quality ('friendly,' 'dusty'), size, shape, age, color, origin, and material."

sophacles 12y ago

Im curious if anyone has looked at examples of writing that have short sentences or phrases around the adjectives for example: When I was a child we would visit grandma's farm. There was a barn there I loved to explore. It was big, it was red, it smelled of hay and had been abandoned for years. vs The big red hay-scented abandoned barn. And if the phrases follow the ordering rules as much as strings of adjectives. Further, if there was a strong correlation, what would that say to us about language and maybe even brain structure? It would be interesting as well to know if that construct, which comes to mind as a way to highlight intentionally out of order adjectives, is actually used that way commonly or I'm just cherry picking random examples in my head.

JshWright 12y ago

Interesting that when Tom Scott did a (great) video on this topic back in December, he used "Big Red" as his example as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

Why does "large red barn" sound wrong, despite the supposed synonymic status of "big" and "large"? Or, if it doesn't sound wrong, why does it tend to give the impression of a very different meaning? I don't think there are such things as pure synonyms, and I also don't believe that "big" and "red" are distinct adjectives in the headline phrase. Rather, they have formed a new "adjective phrase" that has new meaning beyond the sum of the meanings of the individual words. This isn't so strange, the words themselves have more meaning than the sum of the letters' meaning. Thus if you say "red big barn", not only are you avoiding the meaning of the more orthodox phrase, you're showing off that you're not describing it the way others do. If I called a red balloon green, you'd point that out too and think I spoke funny. Same thing here. "Big red barn" is not just saying that the barn is big and also red. It conveys the sense of a certain type of barn, in a certain part of the world, in a certain era. Surely if we were to find some large cattle shack in the Scottish highlands and paint it red, it would fail to become a "big red barn". Or if we found some Sound-of-Music-esque farm building in Switzerland and we diligently painted it, that too would fail to become a "big red barn". The most amazing part of all this, to me, is how blind everyone is to it.

barkingcat 12y ago
It's because inventive language use is dying. Imagine if Dr. Seuss tried to write something today. The big book publishers wouldn't even take a second look at his stuff.
- vlunkr 12y ago
  I don't know about that, his books are still being constantly re-published.
- grahamburger 12y ago
  The publishers of his time didn't take a second look, either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss#Early_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss#Early_career
- sambeau 12y ago
  If you wander around the children's department of a book shop (especially here in the UK) you would soon realise what a ridiculous statement that is. I was in Waterston's children's department (UK bookseller chain) this weekend and found myself amazed at the sheer diversity of kids books. There was a multitude of amazing kids titles full of bonkers ideas and fascinating fun prose (a lot of it made up of made up words and interesting sounds). There were also weird and wonderful illustrations to join them. Myself and my kids browsed and laughed and (in one case - 'Goodbye Mog' - cried (although the language of the book is traditional, the subject matter - death - was unusual for a kids book)). lemony Snicker is also a case of inventive ideas rather than inventive language. But we picked up all sorts of weird books with strange language and big colourful pictures. I came back impressed thinking that the kids book market was in a healthy imaginative state and wishing I went to 'rea'l book shops more often — you don't get a real sense of what is out there from an online bookstore. I'd forgotten how wonderful browsing was.

wyager 12y ago

That's interesting. I was reading about Lojban the other day, and I was thinking to myself that the placement of "sumti" around a given "selbri" was complicated to remember. For example, the word "vecnu" (meaning "sell" in English) is used like this: x1 x2 vecnu x3 where x1 is the seller, x2 is the good being sold, and x3 is the buyer. But I guess now that I think about it, English is just as full of arbitrary ordering rules, even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3".

gioele 12y ago
> even though we have directional indicators like "x1 sells x2 to x3". indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him".
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > indicators that are not always used or needed: "she sold it him". I've never seen that kind of construction used except by very young children or non-native English speakers coming from languages where the role of the prepositions would instead be served by inflecting the noun or pronoun. I don't think its an example of a case where those things aren't required in English, insofar as "required" means anything in a natural language.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    Sure you have. Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to him."
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Sure you have. I'd rather you not try to speak for my experience, since clearly you have no basis for doing so. In any case, you are wrong, possibly because you are confusing two different constructions for the same construction. > Here's an easier example: "I told him that." instead of "I told that to him." That's not the same construction as "She sold it him" in place of "She sold it to him"; its a different construction in which changes to word order conveys the same relationship that is conveyed by prepositions in the form with preopositions. The same construction would be "I told that him". There's a difference between being able to simply drop the prepositions and with there being an alternative mechanism of using word order to replace the prepositions.

joelberman 12y ago

Not the same, but in the same vein this blog caught my attention. http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finni... Complex rules that just seem natural.

dfxm12 12y ago

Is "big red" the best example to use? We might be primed to thinking "big red" is correct because I've seen/read/heard it in other contexts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(gum) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Red_(drink)

pixelcort 12y ago
Hmm, but also "small green frog" vs "green small frog".
- dsuth 12y ago
  It works in that context too. It would have to be a Small Frog (proper noun) to make sense as "green Small frog". What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D
baddox 12y ago
And also Clifford the Big Red Dog.

tokenadult 12y ago

I was a bit disappointed that this article focused on "pure" adjectives without mentioning demonstrative and possessive modifiers. I learned about adjective order differences between languages way back in the 1970s when I took my first course in linguistics. These differences can be quite striking between noncognate languages like English and Chinese. Both in English and in Chinese, most grammatical relationships in sentences are communicated by word order rather than by inflection of words. But the word order rules can differ, particularly in the order of demonstrative versus possessive modifiers of nouns (what we call "adjectives" in English). In English, it is very anomalous to say * "my that book," as the standard word order would be "that book of mine," but in Chinese it is expected to say, "我的那本書," which corresponds to the anomalous word order in English. And so on for most phrases like those contrasted between English and Chinese. One thing that gives native speakers of Chinese an "accent" in English, besides phonology, is grammar differences like that, and of course the same is true when a native speaker of English speaks Chinese as a second language.

camillomiller 12y ago
The same for Italians. We do not use nouns as modifiers, except for some specific situations. You can easily spot an Italian (or some other romance-language native speaker) for his/her resistance to adjectivization. That, and the over-abundant use of terms derived from Latin (wouldn't have "latin-derived terms" sounded more anglosaxon?).
devonkim 12y ago
I was thinking something similar but along a different line of thought using English alone. Possessive modifiers behave differently than other "pure" adjectives and whether it's anaphors. 1) Jim's red barn 1a) My red barn 2) Red Jim's barn (Not awkward like in the headline example, but the meaning has changed completely) 2b) * Red my barn (invalid, period. even if my -> mine - I can do this word order in Korean or Japanese easily due to more explicit case marking) We have to start using some syntactic movement to make the construct syntactically acceptable and semantically natural and equivalent, but doing so makes it possible to be free with word order: 3) Jim's barn that is red 3a) My barn that is red 4) Red barn that is Jim's 4a) Red barn that is mine (my -> mine) 5) Barn that is red and Jim's 5a) Barn that is red and mine 6) Barn that is Jim's and red 6a) Barn that is mine and red The preferences aren't as clear-cut to me as in the headline clause, but we'd rather keep the possessive separate from the pure adjective (3-4 > 5-6, higher is more natural). Using only "pure" adjectives, it looks like the semantic binding preference still sticks though: 7) Big red barn => 7a) Red barn that is big 7b) Big barn that is red 7c) Barn that is red and big 7d) Barn that is big and red Naturalness: 7b > 7a and 7d > 7c. And since 7d > 7b, we have 7d > 7c >= 7b 7a. I'm thinking 7b > 7c but wasn't quite sure because both sound awkward and comparing two mildly awkward clauses is probably not valid here. But hopefully other native speakers roughly agree on the precedence of awkwardness with me and understand why this article is just the tip of the iceberg.

slipperyp 12y ago

Apologies if this seems like an inappropriate fork, but the author uses a convention in the introductory paragraph that I find jarring, at best, and I wonder if anyone knows what it's called? It's this (emphasis added): "...You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code governs..." Is there a name for this? It feels, to me, like an "abbrev" or something, where the speaker wants to either convey cleverness or assume common understanding with the audience. Maybe it could be called a "redditism" - that's where I think I normally see the form. Does it have a name? Just curious...

allochthon 12y ago
This is a recent usage, or even meme -- "because science," etc. She's no doubt using "because" ironically. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...
- slipperyp 12y ago
  Many thanks - that's exactly the discussion I was looking for :)
bobbles 12y ago
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/englis...
ineedtosleep 12y ago
I would take a guess that it is type of Ellipsis[1] -- more specifically, Answer ellipsis[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_%28linguistics%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_ellipsis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_ellipsis EDIT: Keep in mind, I was writing this response before links to the Atlantic were posted (which I haven't read yet).
jamt9000 12y ago

stevenbedrick 12y ago

In case anybody's interested in an application of machine learning to this problem area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558287

goldfeld 12y ago

I can see it going the other way around depending on the emphasis of the narrative. For example, if I were to say "Oh, it was a big, red barn", that sounds wrong, because "red" isn't something you'd usually emphasize. Whereas "It was a red, big barn!" sounds good.

bramvanleur 12y ago

The font property in CSS requires me to say "italic large serif" instead of "large italic serif" which sounds wrong too. Now I know why.

jpswade 12y ago

The English language is a nonsense. For example, “Black box”: In French this would be called a “boîte noire” or literally a “box black”. This seems more logical as first you identify that it is a box you are looking for, secondly that it is black.

lelag 12y ago
It's a strange choice to choose the french language as a example over this matter when it's even worse. Adjectives can be placed in front or after a word and you also have to guess instinctively which is right. Ex : "Un grand homme" (a great man) "Un homme grand" (a tall man) Both are valid but don't mean the same thing. Source : I'm french.
- jpswade 12y ago
  My example used literal translations, so for example: https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20great%20man a great man => un grand homme https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man https://translate.google.com/#auto/fr/a%20tall%20man a tall man => un grand homme In both of these examples, the ordering is the same as English. So yes by that logic, you're right, French is equal to or worse than English.
- MBCook 12y ago
  > and you also have to guess instinctively which is right When I was learning French in school I was taught that the adjectives that go before nouns are the BANGS adjectives: Beauty Age Number Goodness Size. So words like tall, big , small, young old, or many are put before the noun while things like color go after. I'm sure there are counter examples (I only took French for a few years) but it seemed to work very well as a rule of thumb for guessing if you didn't know.
GarvielLoken 12y ago
Yeah! I found the article a bit shallow since it only discussed English like forms. Spanish has the same things "perro Grande" <==> "Dog Big". And has adjective bending forms on nouns, "perrito" <==> "small dog", "cafecito" <==> "little coffe". Disclaimer, I am only learning Spanish, not native speaker.

beardyw 12y ago

“varnished blistered wood” describes wood which is blistered, if such a thing can happen, whereas “blistered varnished wood” says the varnish is blistered which makes more sense. Just a poor example I think.

IneffablePigeon 12y ago
Your example is an exception to the rule, though. Usually, two adjectives don't modify each other. In fact, I find your second example a bit ambiguous because of that very fact -- it could mean that the varnish is blistered or that the wood is blistered. The first seems to make more sense in terms of semantics, and the second seems to make more sense in terms of grammar.

razzaj 12y ago

while "bad little dog" sounds better than "little bad dog", "big bad dog" sounds better than "bad big dog". I wonder if that means that we might be subconsciously interpreting strings from right to left, and in that sense: Little(bad(dog)) would represent less our intended meaning than bad(little(dog)). Whereas Big(bad(dog)) would intuitively enhance our meaning when compared to bad(big(dog)).

zeteo 12y ago

I doubt there's any set rule but it seems to depend on strength of association. For example it's natural to say "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. Another case where "big" has a stronger association than color would be "white big brother". On the other hand "red barn" has its own strong association [1]. Hypothetically if we lived in a community of farmers where "big barn" and "small barn" were structures with very different purposes (but color didn't matter much), it may be possible to conceive of "red big barn" instead. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barn

robotresearcher 12y ago
> "red big toe" because "big toe" is already a strong association. That's because "big toe" is a compound noun that refers to one of your innermost toes only. "big red toe" and "red big toe" mean different things. The set of things they could refer to is different. In your barn example the same thing is true.
- zeteo 12y ago
  I see your point about the compound noun, but is there something in between when we care more about size than color? I'm thinking of a phrase like "we all went fishing and caught little fish, except for John who caught a black-striped big fish". Does this sound natural to anyone else?

JoshTheGeek 12y ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTm1tJYr5_M

mcovey 12y ago

In French some adjectives come after the noun, some come before, and even though my French is not that great, I know enough for some reason to have that gut feeling that "le grand rouge <noun>" sounds weird, and it should be "le grand <noun> rouge". Interesting how even with a second language these habits become ingrained.