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Came here to post the same link. English adjective order is one of those things that we're never taught as speakers of English as a first language, but I'd imag

Came here to post the same link. English adjective order is one of those things that we're never taught as speakers of English as a first language, but I'd imagine it's taught to those learning it as a second language.

snitko 12y ago
Actually, I don't think it's specific to English. In Russian, you can say "Red Big Barn", but it also sounds wrong. So I'm guessing it's similar in other languages.
vegedor 12y ago
For languages close enough to english, the methods of teaching are reasonably organic, as well. I don't remember learning this, discovering it later in preparations for TOEFL. I Can't speak for all, however.
arrrg 12y ago
I don’t recall ever being taught anything about adjective order, but I did pick it up naturally. Or not. I’m really not sure. Some light googling seems to indicate that in German (my native language) the adjective order doesn’t really matter, but some say it actually does (citing pretty much exactly the same rules as in the linked article). To my ears „grüner, großer Drachen“ doesn’t sound as correct as „großer, grüner Drachen“, but maybe that’s just my knowledge of English leaking into my German. It doesn’t sound entirely incorrect to me, either, not in the same way “green great dragon” does. Maybe German does have the same rules about adjective order, but they aren’t as strong? Maybe a teacher would put a wiggly line under wrongly ordered adjectives, but it wouldn’t actually be a serious mistake, just a weird stylistic choice? Also, it’s entirely possible I actually was taught about adjective order, but have forgotten all about it. If you learn English for nine years (with either four or five lessons per week) you do lots of reading and writing, especially during the later years, actual texts from the real world and actual essays. It‘s very possible I picked it up through that and it was never necessary to explicitly teach me about adjective order.
- jameshart 12y ago
  One ordering German (allegedly) has, which I was taught, but assume native speakers are largely unaware they follow (if they do), is 'time/manner/place' in adverbial phrases. The idea is that it is more correct in German to say that you are going tomorrow (time) by bus (manner) to the airport (place), than to say that you are going by bus to the airport tomorrow, or to the airport tomorrow by bus. English cares a lot less about this ordering, but apparently in German we must morgen mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen, and it would be incorrect to instead go zum Flughafen mit dem Bus morgen.
  - Retric 12y ago
    English also has some special meaning around verb ordering. If you say 'expencive ugly car' you want to make a subjective statment about cost vs 'ugly expencive car' when you want to make an ascetic statement about an expencive car. So, I think the general rule is context specific before innate trates. What about German?
  - arrrg 12y ago
    Yeah, totally! I didn’t pay any attention in German class in elementary school at all, so I’m totally unable to recite any rules (and I’m not even sure whether we were ever taught that explicitly), but that ordering totally exists and the incorrect sentence you just made up is actually completely incorrect. It’s not just a stylistic blunder (but people would still understand what you are trying to say). I also remember being explicitly taught about some similar (but different) ordering in English, though I have mostly forgotten about it. I think time is always supposed to come last or something? So “we are going to go to the airport with the bus tomorrow” would be correct (placing tomorrow at the beginning of the sentence would be, too, and would be the variant I would personally prefer), while “we are going to go to the airport tomorrow with the bus”, while still correct, would not be something you’d want to write. Or maybe I’m misremembering, because that second sentence seems correct to me, just placing more of an emphasis on the means of transportation than the first one (i.e. you would use that one when someone already knows about your plans, but asked you how you will get to the airport). I don’t know. This is all a haze. I remember something about time and putting it last.
jameshart 12y ago
Another great example of a rule that exists in English that native speakers generally follow without knowing, but is taught to learners of English as a second language, is the rule of which adjectives form comparatives and superlatives by suffixing '-er' and '-est', and which by prefixing 'more' and 'most'. As a native English speaker I was never taught a rule that explains why I would say hotter or wrigglier or redder or wildest or shiniest, but more emphatic, more open, most excellent or most orange. I'd always assumed adjective -er and -est suffixes were just irregular, with no pattern to them at all. But it turns out there's basically a simple rule - if it ends in '-y' or has only one syllable, you suffix it; otherwise you use the 'more' or 'most' form. It's remarkably solid as a rule, and even when I come up with a word that sounds sort of right to my ear that doesn't follow the rule - like, for example, I can kind of see 'wickedest' as being a valid form - it turns out that if I think about it, it probably doesn't sound right after all, and I would probably prefer 'most wicked'.
- llllllllllll 12y ago
  It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20. An example that strongly goes against the rule: simpler (3185) / more simple (153) simplest (2191) / most simple (87)
  - baddox 12y ago
    "Simple," "narrow," "clever," and "quiet" are usually listed as exceptions to the rule, and their suffixed superlative forms also usually appear in dictionaries.
  - sgustard 12y ago
    And a single-syllable counterexample: funner (24) / more fun (1860)
    - baddox 12y ago
      That analysis is probably confounded by the fact that "more fun" can be used with "fun" as a noun, as in "We had more fun after you arrived."
ajuc 12y ago
It was taught, but I ignored it. I think most people learn languages by pattern matching. I never tried to remember the rules, I just read a lot and know if it sounds OK or not (or sometimes I don't). Using the rules on the fly would be too slow, anyway.
jpatokal 12y ago
As the article says, adjective order seems to be more or less universal. Off the top of my head, the expected order is "big red plane", "iso punainen lentokone" and "ookina akai hikouki" in English, Finnish and Japanese... although French mixes up things by putting the noun in the middle for "grand avion rouge"!
- __float 12y ago
  This could be a reasonable comparison had you not chosen one of the irregular adjectives that places itself before the noun. The large majority of adjectives in French come after. (Though some can come in both positions, differing in meaning depending on placement.)
  - jpatokal 12y ago
    "Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;) But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".
    - stan_rogers 12y ago
      It actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.) In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.
  - MBCook 12y ago

snitko 12y ago

Actually, I don't think it's specific to English. In Russian, you can say "Red Big Barn", but it also sounds wrong. So I'm guessing it's similar in other languages.

vegedor 12y ago

For languages close enough to english, the methods of teaching are reasonably organic, as well. I don't remember learning this, discovering it later in preparations for TOEFL. I Can't speak for all, however.

arrrg 12y ago

I don’t recall ever being taught anything about adjective order, but I did pick it up naturally. Or not. I’m really not sure. Some light googling seems to indicate that in German (my native language) the adjective order doesn’t really matter, but some say it actually does (citing pretty much exactly the same rules as in the linked article). To my ears „grüner, großer Drachen“ doesn’t sound as correct as „großer, grüner Drachen“, but maybe that’s just my knowledge of English leaking into my German. It doesn’t sound entirely incorrect to me, either, not in the same way “green great dragon” does. Maybe German does have the same rules about adjective order, but they aren’t as strong? Maybe a teacher would put a wiggly line under wrongly ordered adjectives, but it wouldn’t actually be a serious mistake, just a weird stylistic choice? Also, it’s entirely possible I actually was taught about adjective order, but have forgotten all about it. If you learn English for nine years (with either four or five lessons per week) you do lots of reading and writing, especially during the later years, actual texts from the real world and actual essays. It‘s very possible I picked it up through that and it was never necessary to explicitly teach me about adjective order.

jameshart 12y ago
One ordering German (allegedly) has, which I was taught, but assume native speakers are largely unaware they follow (if they do), is 'time/manner/place' in adverbial phrases. The idea is that it is more correct in German to say that you are going tomorrow (time) by bus (manner) to the airport (place), than to say that you are going by bus to the airport tomorrow, or to the airport tomorrow by bus. English cares a lot less about this ordering, but apparently in German we must morgen mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen, and it would be incorrect to instead go zum Flughafen mit dem Bus morgen.
- Retric 12y ago
  English also has some special meaning around verb ordering. If you say 'expencive ugly car' you want to make a subjective statment about cost vs 'ugly expencive car' when you want to make an ascetic statement about an expencive car. So, I think the general rule is context specific before innate trates. What about German?
- arrrg 12y ago
  Yeah, totally! I didn’t pay any attention in German class in elementary school at all, so I’m totally unable to recite any rules (and I’m not even sure whether we were ever taught that explicitly), but that ordering totally exists and the incorrect sentence you just made up is actually completely incorrect. It’s not just a stylistic blunder (but people would still understand what you are trying to say). I also remember being explicitly taught about some similar (but different) ordering in English, though I have mostly forgotten about it. I think time is always supposed to come last or something? So “we are going to go to the airport with the bus tomorrow” would be correct (placing tomorrow at the beginning of the sentence would be, too, and would be the variant I would personally prefer), while “we are going to go to the airport tomorrow with the bus”, while still correct, would not be something you’d want to write. Or maybe I’m misremembering, because that second sentence seems correct to me, just placing more of an emphasis on the means of transportation than the first one (i.e. you would use that one when someone already knows about your plans, but asked you how you will get to the airport). I don’t know. This is all a haze. I remember something about time and putting it last.

jameshart 12y ago

Another great example of a rule that exists in English that native speakers generally follow without knowing, but is taught to learners of English as a second language, is the rule of which adjectives form comparatives and superlatives by suffixing '-er' and '-est', and which by prefixing 'more' and 'most'. As a native English speaker I was never taught a rule that explains why I would say hotter or wrigglier or redder or wildest or shiniest, but more emphatic, more open, most excellent or most orange. I'd always assumed adjective -er and -est suffixes were just irregular, with no pattern to them at all. But it turns out there's basically a simple rule - if it ends in '-y' or has only one syllable, you suffix it; otherwise you use the 'more' or 'most' form. It's remarkably solid as a rule, and even when I come up with a word that sounds sort of right to my ear that doesn't follow the rule - like, for example, I can kind of see 'wickedest' as being a valid form - it turns out that if I think about it, it probably doesn't sound right after all, and I would probably prefer 'most wicked'.

llllllllllll 12y ago
It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20. An example that strongly goes against the rule: simpler (3185) / more simple (153) simplest (2191) / most simple (87)
- baddox 12y ago
  "Simple," "narrow," "clever," and "quiet" are usually listed as exceptions to the rule, and their suffixed superlative forms also usually appear in dictionaries.
- sgustard 12y ago
  And a single-syllable counterexample: funner (24) / more fun (1860)
  - baddox 12y ago
    That analysis is probably confounded by the fact that "more fun" can be used with "fun" as a noun, as in "We had more fun after you arrived."

ajuc 12y ago

It was taught, but I ignored it. I think most people learn languages by pattern matching. I never tried to remember the rules, I just read a lot and know if it sounds OK or not (or sometimes I don't). Using the rules on the fly would be too slow, anyway.

jpatokal 12y ago

As the article says, adjective order seems to be more or less universal. Off the top of my head, the expected order is "big red plane", "iso punainen lentokone" and "ookina akai hikouki" in English, Finnish and Japanese... although French mixes up things by putting the noun in the middle for "grand avion rouge"!

__float 12y ago
This could be a reasonable comparison had you not chosen one of the irregular adjectives that places itself before the noun. The large majority of adjectives in French come after. (Though some can come in both positions, differing in meaning depending on placement.)
- jpatokal 12y ago
  "Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;) But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".
  - stan_rogers 12y ago
    It actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.) In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.
- MBCook 12y ago