Thats seems more like a arbitrary cultural distinction versus a rule. It sounds odd, but a half second of thought should make it obvious it makes perfect sense.
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.
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."
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. :-)
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.
Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
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.
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.