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I’m glad to know this. I really doubt i could remember ten letters of acronym…
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It does. But it follows another convention [1] whose name I don’t know. It applies across multiple languages. I call it the “badda-bing, badda-bam, badda-boom” rule. When you have a string of words that differ primarily by a vowel sound, the order of the vowel sounds is i, a, o. Big, bad wolf.
Also:
Someone told me once that native speakers of a language only know two rules:
- “That sounds right”, and
- “That doesn’t sound right.”
[1] I hesitate to call anything in English a rule.
edit: missing word
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I concur.
I really struggled to understand grammer in school, yet I could still speak (Hiberno) English correctly.
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I use the republican order of adjectives (not to be confused with the Republican order of adjectives that they have in the USA).
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And, to be honest, they don’t even agree about that. Many things I see/hear today do not sound right, yet the people saying/writing them clearly think they do.
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Well, y’know what? I’m not diagramming sentences anymore, and I don’t care a bit to confirm that my adjectives are in order with some rule.
Everybody knows the English language is full of exceptions to the so-called rules.
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That’s just it-English speakers seem to use this pattern of adjectives even though it is not defined or taught in school. It seems to be, as it were, an emergent feature of the language. Maybe it’s transmitted simply by common usage and so people just don’t hear a different order of adjectives often enough to make it a choice.
In Latin, word order is much less important than it is in English, because of the way words are formed. It would be interesting to see if any of the Romance languages have the same pattern as English or if it doesn’t matter so much.
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… because it’s strongly declined, and the sense is clear (mostly) whichever order the words are in.
Mostly. Because prepositions still have to come before the word they govern. It’s in aedificio, not !aedificio in. Adverbs have to come close to their verb, where adjectives can be arbitrarily far away from their noun.
And the sense is clear whether it’s canis virum mordat, or canis mordat virum, or mordat virum canis: the dog is biting and the man is being bitten.
And yet, there’s a natural order. A word order which felt sort of normal and default. In Latin it was typically SOV: canis virum mordat = “a dog bites a man”. All the other ways of arranging those words are either emphasising something, or just … marked. Saying it differently because you can.
And there’s still an order in adjectives. If nothing else: demonstratives “this, that, those” and adjectives of size and quantity come before the noun: hoc forum, illa mensa, magna urbs; others tend to come after: puer pulcher, femina bona.
You can still say urbs magna or pulcher puer, but it’s odd, you’re emphasising something.
The romance languages basically fixed on SVO. Le chien mord l’homme. Il perro muerde al hombre. Il cane morde l’uomo.
“Less important” does not mean “not important”, even in a strongly declined language like Latin.
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Oh, good question. Even without it being the name of a character it sounds right, while substituting “little” for “big” would flip it.
“You’re a big bad man!” and “You’re a big mean bully!”
“You’re a bad little boy!” and “You’re a mean little bully!”
Does the location of the “size” adjective depend on whether it’s “big” or “little?”
Ooh, I love this.
Ship-shape. Tip-top. Ping pong. Tic tac toe. Ding dong. Even the Scandinavian fairytale ending “Snipp, snapp, snute. Haar eventurye ute” (“Snip, snap snout. This tale’s told out.”)
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These types of patterns are why neurolinguistics exists as a field of study-is there some physical component to language that both allows and delineates how spoken language works in humans? If so, how is it wired? How much does it control how languages come into use and change over time? Very nifty questions, with lots of investigation still to do.
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I’ve just found a fascinating chapter on how poets mess about with expectations of syntax
It’s replete with examples, in several different languages–English, Old English, French German, Latin and Greek.
For Example:
Unusual Word Order and Other Syntactic Quirks in Poetry. (2019). Poetry and Language, 104–141. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554152.005
More romantic poets might think that they are tapping into an older, more ancestral style, and someone tired of contemporary prose might well be inclined to believe them…
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That’s beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
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It’s funny that only well into adulthood did I become (consciously) aware of this, after it was pointed out, and I only really thought of it as a curiosity. It strikes me, however, that the thing about grammatical rules, even soft ones like this, is that breaking them can convey information by emphasizing particular words. “The big, red book” follows the ‘rule’ and is unremarkable, but “the red, big book” doesn’t - but it allows the implication that there are multiple big books, and the red one is the one in particular that’s significant, for instance.
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You’re absolutely right that the rule can be bent or broken, or perhaps flexed, depending on circumstances, or for literary purposes.
I only found out about adjective order rules when I joined a company which specialised in publishing materials for teaching English to non-native speakers. (English Language Teaching, or English as a Second Language, or English for Speakers of Other Languages.)
It’s the kind of rule which native speakers of any language somehow absorb during childhood, but which must be teased out, analysed, and specifically taught to foreigners. As a Brit, I did English Language at school because it’s a requirement in the UK and was never taught this rule.
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“a large and golfing talented membership”
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somebody posted a video from robert krulwich ( radio lab ) a bit back ( hmmm. back a bit? ) about that
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I only got hip to this w/in the last coupla decades. We weren’t even taught this during the snooty private school’s 2-3x/yr Grammar Week. Were it part of the lesson plan, it’s so basic, it would have been Level I or II.
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As snooty as this?
(Farewell, Mr Bunting)
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