Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

Your intuition is correct. “We are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus" is fine, it just emphasizes the mode of transportation.

Note "by bus" and not "with the bus", which is technically correct ("How are you getting to the airport?" "We're going with the bus.") but sounds a bit odd; "We're taking the bus" or "We're going by bus" would be more natural.

After considering it more, I realized the only case in which "with the bus" is acceptable is when you are referring to "the bus" as a group of people, where you could plausibly say "the bus group". And that is why I considered changing the example to "with the shuttle" (as that sounded more plausible to me): because you are more likely to know a group of people on a shuttle than an entire bus.

Adverbs and adverbial phrases can move pretty freely in English. These all sound fine to me:

we are going to go to the airport by bus tomorrow

we are going to go by bus to the airport tomorrow

tomorrow, we are going to go to the airport by bus

we are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus

we are going to go tomorrow to the airport by bus

The last sentence sounds a little more awkward, but if you're emphasizing when the event is occurring, it would be fine. Similarly, in the right context:

to the airport, we are going to go by bus tomorrow

by bus, we are going to go to the airport tomorrow

This phenomenon is called topicalization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topicalization

Thanks for confirming my hazy German grammar memories. I had the impression it was a strong rule, but I also learned a lot of subjunctive and genitive forms that are pretty much unused in spoken German, so I didn't want to overstate the situation with time/manner/place sequencing in case it was a similar case of book-rules versus real life.

I don't want to come across as mean, but this is a thread for pedants, and I couldn't resist the irony:

> So “we are going to go to the airport with the bus tomorrow” would be correct

Actually you go by bus, or on the bus, never with the bus.

No, no, that’s quite alright. See, it did sound wrong to me but I couldn’t come up with anything better on the spot so I left it that way. “With the bus” is the German construction, so an easy mistake to make.

I remember studying French. In French, most adjectives come after the noun they modify (ciel bleu, blue sky), but some come before (grande maison, big house). We were taught the acronym: BAGS: beauty, age, goodness, size, to determine what came before the noun. So a big blue house would be grande maison bleue. A pretty girl is a jolie fille. An old man is a vieil homme. A bad idea is a mauvaise idée. I doubt native french speakers learn this explicitly, but when your learning it as a second language you need shortcuts to understand what sounds intuitively correct and incorrect to natives.

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?

I learned a slightly more elaborate version of the rule -- tekamolo (Temporal, Kausal, Modal, Lokal). This rule adds reason (Kausal) in between time and manner, so for example I expect if you were taking the bus because of the rain, you would want to say morgen wegen des Regens mit dem Bus zum Flughafen gehen.

Yeah, I'm learning German and in Italian we call it Te.Ca.Mo.Lo. To remember the order:

- Time (TEmpo) - Causality (CAusalitá) - MOde (MOdo) - Location (LOcazione)

It's convenient (for speakers of other European languages, at least) that German grammarians and scholars were so influenced by Latin that the relevant technical terms in German are all directly borrowed from Latin.

If they'd called it Zeit, Grund, Art, Lage, it would probably be a lot harder for both of us to remember! (Those are native German words for time, reason, manner, place.)

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