A Fun Thing I Saw On Twitter
Well, I thought it was fun anyway, but I am a writer and that by definition means a language person.
This gem bounced into my Twitter feed via Matt Anderson of the BBC (@MattAndersonBBC) and fellow writer, Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) in Australia. So now you know it’s fully international in an Anglo-Australasian sort of way. (OK, that’s a pretty narrow definition of “international”, but still, wider than just NuZild.)
Anyway, here’s the quote, which comes to you under the title:
Things Native English Speakers Know, But Just Don’t Know We Know
“…Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose-Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
Unless, that is, they were green great-dragons… (Sorry, just being a smart… I mean, writer!)
Smart-alecking aside, the quote’s fun, innit? I love the idea of this implicit but invisible order to the language that we follow mostly unconsciously.
If you have other examples of similar linguistic phenomena and/or principles, I’d love to see them in the comments.
Third time lucky, think my computer is having a grump at me and not letting me post things.
I like that we instinctively know grammatical rules but could not explain them. I saw this a couple of years ago, you may have seen it already, but it made me smile. Good example of how much of our pronunciation is based on context. Needs to be read aloud to get the best of it.
https://spelling.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/english-pronunciation/
Shona, this is great: thank you for sharing the link. 🙂