In this case, "robotic" and "private" could be similar enough in category to be confusing. In the Order of Adjectives[0], "robotic" is in the TYPE category, near the bottom of the list, and "private" seems to fit in that same category at first glance. By that interpretation, either "robotic private" or "private robotic" works.
What if instead of "private" it said "Californian"? That would make it an ORIGIN, and "Californian robotic spacecraft" becomes the obvious choice — otherwise, you'd think they were talking about a spacecraft belonging to robots from California. ;)
So if we interpret "private" as an ORIGIN, your "private robotic spacecraft" sounds better. That would have been my choice as well.
[0]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
What an in-depth and thoughtful answer. Thank you for this!
Perhaps more importantly, in well written English superfluous words are removed - thus 'private robotic spacecraft' becomes 'private spacecraft', since all spacecraft are by definition at least partly autonomous.
“Private spacecraft tips over on moon” would mean something rather different if a modern-day Neil Armstrong were inside at the time.
If anything, the fact that it’s just a machine matters more to me than who paid for it.
Not unique to English, either: Wikipedia has examples in Tagalog where the order is almost the same (apart from a clause inserted in the middle of the second sequence).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_grammar#Sequence_of_mo...
Mr T invented an "Elvish" script and language and I think he also did so for Dwarves too. I'm pretty sure he was a prof at Oxbridge with a focus in languages, mostly English.
Most English native speakers never notice adjective order as being a thing.
It is a thing and I suspect Prof Tolkien learned that dimension comes first and colour second. I don't know why we insist on this but it is pretty deep!
there's lots of articles on it. like this one https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/597981/adjective-order-g... and it's true that most of the time it just sounds odd or is confusing if you get the order "wrong".
In brief, then, English does have some similarities with con-langs.
I think it is a weird phrase to say 'robotic private spacecraft' as well. It would be much better to say 'privately funded unmanned spacecraft' or 'robotic spacecraft launched by a private company'. Much less chance of confusion.
Even crazier is that we intuitively mix this rule with another implicit rule, where “I” sounds go before “A” sounds go before “O” sounds in similar words, so “big, bad wolf” violates the normal adjective ordering rule but would sound weird any other way because of… reasons.
Language is insane.
As you say, language is insane.
Now, adjective ordering. I think there is an "official" order but native speakers are not formally taught it because it is largely innate for us. It is likely something taught as a very advanced language feature because you can mix up the order and it still works.
I think a few experiments are in order:
Dark satanic mills. Jolly green giant. Large blue marble. Long winding road. Darling buds of May. Big fat Greek wedding. OK it looks like:
* Emotive (jolly, happy, sad)
* Quantitative (big, small, fat, tall, short)
* Colour
* Shape (winding)
* Other adjectives - needs some work
* Noun
I wonder if this is a regional difference. The OED claims that intuit as a verb has been in continuous use since the 1860s (at least) and I've heard it used as a verb my entire life (various areas in the US).
That's a fair source but I went to a pretty posh school in Oxfordshire! Oxford was about 90p return away by bus from Abingdon in the mid to late 1980s. I studied English to O (Ordinary) level (both language and literature) and bagged a pair of Bs.
I might also point out that I also attended schools in Devon, Manchester and multiple places in West Germany (UK Army brat).
Obviously, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and I have only my own recollections to go by but I have never knowingly heard intuit as a verb. I have only ever seen it written by Americans (for a given value of America)!
I do like it and will fall in line forthwith!
As a non-native speaker who was never taught it, for some reason I pick the difference naturally. English native speaker sounds like as e.g. opposed to American or maybe Irish to me, and it actually adds vagueness to what language we’re talking about. Cause there are English native speakers of French.
While native English speaker sounds like exactly native speakers of English regardless of origin.
I think it’s a feature of languages in general, and there’s not as much of an official ordering, but rather an ordering that performs default binding of meanings. In hard cases you fallback to prepositions, in light cases you just employ order.
[0] “Privately owned”, while on its own an adverb and verb, is functioning as a singular adjective in the larger phrase.
Edit: Previously said “funded”, not “owned”
private, robotic spacecraft (with comma) -> private and robotic are attributes to spacecraft, the order could be changed but as in english you have an order that is more likely used
private robotic spacecraft (without comma) -> the attribute private refers to a robotic spacecraft
If you would like to emphasize that this is a private (and not public) robotic spacecraft you would use the version without comma.
I believe even though this trait does not feel proper in written English, it's somewhat common in spoken English, if you interpret the comma as a stulting of rhythym and tone.
I'm a native English speaker and wasn't even aware of this adjective ordering rule, until I read about it recently. I had internalised it, but wasn't consciously aware of it. I feel so sorry for anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language!
opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose
It is sometimes difficult to classify adjectives this way, but "private" is probably opinion and "robotic" is probably purpose, so you are correct, "private robotic spacecraft" is probably correct.
The problem with English, of course, is that you can figure out what someone means, even if they jumble all their words up, most of the time.
I wonder if the standard of English composition has been reducing in journalism, over the past few years.
Sounds a bit wrong, I want to put American first.
That would require labelling the spacecraft transgender, then cutting its budget.
I don't know. It's weird that there's obviously some kind of ruleset here, but it's difficult to nail it down.
You can order a large quantity of fries or a small quantity of fries, giving 4 possible orders: large large fries, large small fries, small large fries, and small small fries.
If an order of large small fries asking for a large quantity of the shoestring fries or a small quantity of the steak fries?
I think I'd expect it to mean a large quantity of the shoestring fries.
Perhaps something like “jumbo fries” or “mini fries” or something more creative.
Evaluative > general property > age > color > provenance > manufacture > type
[There's plenty of elaboration on what kinds of descriptors fit into each category. For example, artisanally handcrafted goes in the "manufacture" category, and the label "manufacture" makes sense for it, but the label "material" doesn't.]
CGEL also correctly notes that this order only applies when all descriptors are being coordinated in parallel; if that isn't the case, the innermost descriptors must appear on the right, joining the head of the phrase.
> In the absence of special factors, a modifier of size precedes one of colour: a large black sofa represents the preferred order while a black large sofa is very unnatural. But this constraint can be overridden, as in [ii]: the context here is one where it has already been established that I want a large sofa, so that now only the colour is at issue. Black is thus interpreted restrictively, picking out a subset of the large sofas, and in this context in can precede large.
> while a new cotton shirt, say, is normally preferred over a cotton new shirt, the latter is not ungrammatical. It is admissible, for example, in a context where there has been talk of new shirts, and the concern is with different kinds of new shirt.
[Returning to that earlier example, you'd always expect an artisanally handcrafted Belgian waffle and not a Belgian artisanally handcrafted waffle because "Belgian waffle" is its own idea. "Belgian" and "handcrafted" are not parallel; this is a Belgian waffle that is handcrafted, not a waffle that is handcrafted and also Belgian.]
I was surprised to learn that ESL classes emphasize descriptor order so heavily. It is a real rule of fluent English usage. But the only thing that can happen if you get it wrong is that other people notice you're foreign, so in almost all cases learning the ordering has zero value to the student. Almost all students are obviously foreign by many, many different tells, and aren't hoping to pass for native.
Is probably either Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language from 1985 or The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language from 2002.
I have no idea which.
I don't know a lot about language stuff like this, but the conversation here interested me. Your comment gave me an in on more reading, so I googled your acronym, because it was unfamiliar to me. I got 2 prominent results. Wikipedia gave me a disambiguation page.
>Does it matter to you?
It matters to me because I wanted to know what you were talking about... Maybe follow up with some more learning myself. Sorry.
I'll try to learn the acronyms for fields I'm not familiar with prior to getting interested in them next time.
I love reading from it, but you might want to know that it's an 1842-page reference work, so reading the whole thing for fun might take a while. Mostly I use it if I want to look up how it treats some phenomenon that's caught my interest.
So far I've always been able to find a discussion of whatever it was that I wanted to look up, which is a testament to both the quality of the treatment and the quality of the index.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order
Arguably "private" is origin and "robotic" is purpose.
[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
Phenomena is plural. The singular form is phenomenon.
(Other similar words with a Greek root: lexicon/lexica, criterion/criteria, automaton/automata)
(Thanks. I was aware of this, but I still mess it up from time to time. Same for media/medium, though not nearly as much anymore.)
Etymologically, you'd expect it to apply to the physics particles named for qualities, like photon, but I don't think that's ever done.
I think this is a fair analogy: suppose we were talking about a "private detective". If we were writing a sci-fi book, we might talk about a "robotic private detective", but "private robotic detective" would sound odd.
Now, I'll grant that "private detective" has a lot more cultural weight than "private spacecraft", but I think it's fair to say that at least the word "private" is playing a nearly identical role in both phrases. With that in mind, I think "robotic private spacecraft" makes sense.
I suppose you could take this argument one step further and resolve the ambiguity by asking which distinction (robotic/non-robotic, private/public) the article writer thinks is more notable and placing that first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
At least I think that's the right term (I hunted around for one that fits). So, is private spacecraft also a compound? Is it idiomatic? Maybe. Another example is little black dress, where "my new little black dress" sounds right and "my little new black dress" seems to refer to a different kind of garment.
phenomenon is the singular, phenomena is the plural, dear native speaker ;)
google: phenomenon vs phenomena
or:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english/...
I (native english speaker) would order it as "mobile robotic probes". But if I were writing it, I'd say "robotic probe", "surface probe", or "mobile probe". In this case, robotic and mobile mean the same thing, so using both is redundant.
And although I would order it as "private robotic spacecraft", I don't think that's correct. The spacecraft is robotic, but it's not private. It might be privately-operated, privately-owned, or privately-funded (each has a slightly different connotation). But private by itself means that a private company is somehow responsible for the mission.
So if I were writing it, I'd use something like "privately-funded robotic spacecraft" or "robotic spacecraft operated by private company XYZ".