If your mother tongue is English, you almost certainly follow this strange grammatical rule, despite never being actively taught it.
There’s an unspoken order for adjectives in English: Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun.
Nothing is stopping you from ignoring this rule, but it will make your sentence sound a little bit clunky and unnatural. For non-native speakers, it can be surprisingly tricky to grasp. However, understanding this can dramatically improve your fluency and tone.
For example, a smooth sentence might say something like: “A beautiful (opinion) small (size) old (age) round (shape) yellow (color) Italian (origin) leather (material) handbag (noun).” Although it describes the exact same thing, it feels odd to say: “A yellow old beautiful Italian leather round small handbag.”
This curious quirk of the English language was pointed out in a social media post that went viral back in 2016, citing a passage from the book The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth.
Other languages have similar rules, but they’re noticeably more flexible. In French, for instance, adjectives often occur after the noun, and the order is not set in stone. “A big red car” is “Une voiture rouge et grande”, which literally translates as “a car red and big”. However, some adjectives (like beau, grand, petit) come before the noun in fixed phrases, making it seem less rigid than English.
Truth be told, it’s not clear why adjectives need to be in this order in English. As explained by Grammarly, one theory suggests that the closer an adjective is to the noun, the more essential it is to the noun’s identity. For instance, calling something a “brick house” is more precise than calling it an “old house” or a “beautiful house.” However, there are plenty of holes in this idea. Take, for example, the phrases “small dog” and “black dog.” Is “black dog” really a more specific description than “small dog”?
Another similar theory is that the order tends to move from subjective (opinion) to more fixed, descriptive qualities (like material or purpose). Once again, though, there are exceptions. For instance, if you’re talking about a “lovely old ceramic mug”, is “ceramic” (material) more objective than “old” (age)? It’s hard to say.
Just to make things even more confusing, English has a bunch of other unwritten rules. One is known as ablaut reduplication, which explains how similar groups of words are ordered based on their vowels. This quirky rule explains why certain paired words always appear in a specific order based on their vowel sounds: I comes before A, which comes before O.
That’s why we say ping pong (not pong ping), tick tock (not tock tick), and King Kong (not Kong King). This rule typically overrides the usual order of adjectives. That’s why we say “the Big Bad Wolf”, not “the Bad Big Wolf,” which sounds completely off. Without ablaut reduplication, familiar phrases would sound strangely wrong.
So, if you ever hear someone say that “English is an easy language to learn,” spare a thought for the poor soul trying to figure out why Big Bad Wolf apparently sounds fine, but Bad Big Wolf sounds like an alien trying to convince you it’s human.
Source Link: English Speakers Obey This Quirky Grammar Rule, Even If They Don't Know It
