[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
On a lot of languages, the order of the words can change a lot depending on what you want to stress, but English gives you very little leeway. Thus if you try to apply your skill of ordering the words right to express yourself, you will fail almost every time.
This would amaze me. How sure you are about this? Or do you mean something like "all languages I speak"?
Gary-John Scott (2002)
I am a linguist who works in the field, performing basic research on languages that have very little documentation. I am aware of how tentative initial grammars of many of the world's languages are because I am involved in writing them myself. These works are the primary data that most linguistic theorists tend to use when making broad typological claims, i.e. claims about all languages. Theoretical works like Gary-John Scott are essentially meta-studies, secondary reinterpretations of primary research. This is fine for generating hypotheses but it is not valid to claim that a grammar, itself, is truth. Grammars, themselves, are essentially theories. They may be very preliminary. My point is that there is a telephone game aspect to these types of works at any point in the chain from native speaker to typologist errors, biases and misrepresentations may have occurred.
Additionally, it is important to realize that the methods used in primary linguistic research are underdeveloped. The following paper, which is still in press, outlines some of the empirical issues faced by linguists researching understudied languages:
Empirical evidence in research on meaning, Tonhauser and Matthewson:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.730...
One thing that someone with a science background may find surprising is that the methodological suggestions made by the authors are so modest. They include the notion that one should control the context in which a stimulus is provided, that one should have a clearly stated hypothesis when eliciting linguistic judgments and also clearly state what question was put to the speaker. Sadly, these are controversial in linguistic research, indicating just how underdeveloped many areas of our discipline are.
Gary-John Scott might happen to be right (I doubt it) but if so, it is not because they have made their case scientifically. They have only provided sufficient evidence to motivate a hypothesis.
I'm genuinely curious. And also trying to discern whether your point is that many-- but not necessarily _all_-- current languages seem to conform to this hypothesis, or that actually very few seem to.
No I don't think so, we have to deal with a lot of annoying dialects ;-)
In that example it's not the pronunciation, "Kaiserslauten" is just wrong. It's like saying "New Yok" or "Hong Kog".
(this is usually spelled "New Yawk" when writing dialect)
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"?
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."
Also interesting and surprisingly rule-bound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation
Lol at “citation needed”
<gives purple ball>
“Wait, I actually need a red big ball.”
One was slightly larger then the other. Life Lesson, either both must be identical, or don’t get.
In the extreme case (like you gave) where "BigBall(tm)" is an irreducible thing it itself, then of course "big" goes last.
“Lexicon Valley” is another language focused podcast that looks at how our use of language has changed over time.
I am curious if you can point to some article about this being a universal.
Classifiers are a common example; words are often taught with classifiers (in most IE languages, gender) but you pick up words in reading or speech and automatically absorb the appropriate classifier even if not used, from other syntactic agreements. Japanese of course has a richer set than gender.
In another case: German, how you compose compound words (and far more interesting to me, how you read unfamiliar ones at a glance rather than parsing them as a student would) uses rules that just "feel obvious" after a while.
You a fast learner. It usually takes me several years of daily, primary use of a language before these kinds of things are intuitive.
Then again, Japanese adjectives don't behave very much English adjectives, keiyoushi (-i) conjugate much like verbs while keiyoudoushi (-na) are basically nouns with syntactic glue tacked on.
But as you mentioned, as far as I understand, the ordering is much more about emphasis than some set rule - to put it with some contrived conversations:
A: I saw a big blue ball B: Eh? It was a big RED ball!
vs
A: I saw a big red ball B: Eh? It was a SMALL red ball!
then either ordering could sound natural in context. But I'm not Japanese so I can ask my wife later if that's really the case.
https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8D%E...
Basically, there is a short list of common adjectives including ookii and chiisai that have special 連体詞 forms ending in -na.
Though Indian languages derived from Sanskrit have simpler rules and the adjectives are roughly in the same order as English (but the endings have to match the noun).
büyük kırmızı top ("big red ball") sounds right, kırmızı büyük top ("red big ball") sounds wrong (feels like "red" is describing the word "big", nor sure why).
Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc.
Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.
That sounds descriptive to me.
I'd always heard "prescriptivist dictionary" is a thing that exists but now that I'm thinking about it I'm kind of doubting it.
Acronyms look weird to me when not written in all caps, yet when they turn into commonplace proper nouns (e.g. when people an acronym without even knowing the expansion) such spelling is essentially vestigial.
Luckily English spelling has a fondness for vestigial forms, unlike languages like German that undergo periodic spelling "reform"
There was one attempt recently, but it didn't change much.
The Turkish switch to Latin script about 100 years ago was a much bigger deal. And they went completely phonetic.
Going completely phonetic is also possible, but fraught with severe problems:
- major convincing of all literate speakers required.
- there might be more than one way to spell certain words if phonetic features of the language make it difficult. For example consonant clusters or vowel modifications by tones, such as in Vietnamese. Representing just the tones is also already quite tricky.
- definite FU to the dialects since the spelling is going to be aligned to the prestige variant or to a compromise variant nobody speaks.
- all existing literature would become difficult to understand within a generation or two.
- A phonetic writing system, together with pronunciation rules a linguist would still understand in a few hundred years, makes it possible to fix pronunciation. We humans are surprisingly good at coming up with such systems. But languages still change, and the writing system will therefore accumulate artifacts. Cue the ğ in Turkish, which changed its role to a vowel lengthener.
Going phonetic is still the rational choice when introducing an alphabet for a language that didn't have one before, or one of a different kind. You have to alphabetize people anyways, and there is not much literature yet.
Austria and Prussia officialized spelling in he 19th century (Prussia simply said “whatever Duden says”). The German government reformed the language in the early 20th century. Apparently there was an attempt in 44 but I haven’t heard much about it — there was a lot of other stuff going on at the same time.
I don’t know if you were around for the one in 96 — it was significant enough to be quite controversial even at the international level. When my kid entered school in 2004 there was a furious argument among the parents as to whether the new spelling rules should be adopted (foolish, as the new rules were the law).
I believe the 1902 reform was when ß was defined to be „ss“ rather than „sz“ as it is drawn and named (I always thought it would have been cute Salzgitter’s symbol to have been ß rather than SZ’.
Of course there are less formal changes as well: the adoption of Latin letterforms pretty much killed some Fraktur letters like tz (I inherited some books from a friend whose own schoolbooks from the 1930s still used and taught these letters)
So Covid, Nasa, and radar/laser; but FBI, CIA, and UPS.
I do this in my own writing, except for “NASA”. Just feels wrong to lowercase that one.
And of course, laser and radar are just words at this point. Their origins may be acronymic, but like you said: common language mints new words.
If you speak a prestige dialect your patterns are "rules" and if you don't your patterns are "errors." But in both cases it has nothing to do with the language per se, just social and political relationships.
In the "big red ball" vs. "red big ball" case it can be deliberately used to change the way the term parses. The "normal" one means a ball that is both red and big. The abnormal one implies that "big ball" is lexically a single object, perhaps a proper noun, and that the "red" modifier is being applied to it.
Let's change the noun. If a native speaker says, "big red hands," you can normally assume they're speaking of large hands which are colored red.
However, if they say "red big hands," this parses to "red big-hands," meaning "big-hands" is treated as a title, or perhaps a brand. You might see this title capitalized: "red Big-Hands".
Going back to the first example, if you mean "red hands" as a title, you could write "big Red Hands" or better yet, "big Red-Hands," meaning something big with the title Red-Hands. Since the adjective order is the same as grammatically conventional English, the hyphen helps distinguish the writer's meaning. But nowadays I find writers often leave it out when the adjective order implies the multi-word title.
hairy brown bigfoot. :-)
This is the exception that proves the rule, though, as "big" is now in fact part of the ball's identity, rather than something merely describing the ball.
Seeing this phrase (or "Begs the question") used appropriately is always a pleasant surprise.
You hear an example in Boris Johnson PM talking about "new _blue_ passport", people getting a "new passport" is a thing, but if you say a 'blue "new passport"' then people will find that a foreign turn off phrase and assume you're a non-native speaker or you're having a stroke (ie a medical problem with your brain).
I mean, yeah, if it's a noun phrase it might work, but even if we're taking about a red zorb, it's not going to be "red big ball" unless Big Ball is a trade mark or brand name or whatever.
I can't imagine any editor would let you get away with something like "the red big-ball."
It’s especially annoying when English natives arrogantly deride other languages for being too complicated or ambiguous. Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”)
That's hardly unique to English. Heck, even in German, there are at least four ways to pronounce the letter "s".