Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist, teacher, slacker. This week, we're ordering adjectives.
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My daughter and I have been playing a Mario game recently. At six years old, she's the perfect age to play a second character while I power us through the levels. We usually play in our usual mix of English and Japanese. She speaks to me mainly in Japanese and I usually answer in English. We made it to a level where several different types of piranha plant tried to snap us up. She said, "Look out for the green, big one!"
Now, the question is, is there anything wrong with her sentence? According to the grammar books I teach out of, yes. The error comes in the order of the adjectives. According to the textbook, we (English speakers) always put our adjectives in the following order: size, shape, color. Her sentence ought to have been "Look out for the big, green one."
In the classroom, this is not the sort of error I would correct unless it were the explicit focus of the lesson. Generally, I go with the theory that if the error does not cause any undue miscommunication, well, then, it's not really an error. Teaching this way builds student confidence, allows me to focus on generally more important grammar, and saves me a lot of headaches in trying to explain why, exactly, we have such a stupid rule.
And yet.
My daughter has just turned six. And, at six she is a fluent Japanese speaker. It is, for better or worse, her native language. But she's trying to speak as much English as possible. Like most kids in her situation, some days are better than others. More importantly, she wants to talk to me in English. She doesn't want to have every single thing she says corrected. There's a time and place for that. During a Mario game is not it.
But let's talk about that rule for a minute. If I sound a little dismissive or disdainful, it's because that particular rule drives me a bit bananas. I'll explain why, but first, here is a brief rundown:
From Cambridge Dictionary:
When more than one adjective comes before a noun, the adjectives are normally in a particular order. Adjectives which describe opinions or attitudes (e.g. amazing) usually come first, before more neutral, factual ones (e.g. red).
They go on to give the order as: opinion => size => physical quality => shape => age => colour => origin => material => type => purpose.
From there, Grammar Monster has a great chart breaking this down even further by whether the adjectives are cumulative or coordinate ones:
Cumulative adjectives work together to modify their noun... Cumulative adjectives must appear in a specific order, and they cannot be separated by commas or the word "and."
And to round it all out, here's a really good piece from the Guardian which talks about the rule and where it comes from (the article calls the rule "order force" which certainly sounds more official.)
So, as to why it drives me bananas. This rule, like so many others in English is less rule and more ingrained habit and holdovers from English's parent languages. Thus, it is not really a communicative rule. And, to make it truly vexing - it's not a consistent rule. The Guardian article above mentions a second rule, the rule of ablaut reduplication which...I'm not going to get into here. Just read the article, it's good. In other words, we have a rule that is difficult to explain, not followed consistently, and generally not miscommunication-causing.
I guess the heart of the matter, for me, comes down to the fine line between teaching and parenting. In the classroom, this is an old issue. I'm prepared for it. I have a dozen worksheets students can use to practice with and a couple of canned explanations that work well across all my varying types of students. But none of that is going to work (nor should it) with my kid.
Instead, I praise her for her English usage and make sure she's listening when I describe the scene in a more natural way. And then I step on some piranha plants.
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That's all for this week. Stay safe, stay sane. Always question the rules you're given.
Joel
Interesting article, Joel. My take on "rules" like this is that they're not prescriptive (ie, how something should be done) but descriptive (how they generally are done). Dolphins swim, politicians tell lies, and English speakers put size before colour when listing adjectives. To break the rule isn't necessarily to be wrong; it's to break with a norm. I'm with you - "correcting" someone who does that is counterproductive. There's nothing to correct and, like you say, you'd have to be a bit of a shit to do it most of the time anyway. Keep up the great writing!