Grammar - Rules are Rules…even if you don’t know them
Richard Hale
? 26 years' experience & expertise, helping businesses remove the stress & expense of localisation, by providing accurate specialist translation services on time, every time. Over 2600 clients helped so far! ??????????
Did you know that there are grammar rules that we know but don’t know we know? That’s a mouthful! Let us explain…
Why does the phrase green, little men sound so wrong? Besides the fact that we tend not to see small, green-coloured men wandering around very often… But try little, green men and the phrase sounds much less awkward! The answer is to do with the order of the adjectives green and little. The writer Mark Forsyth explains that adjectives in English sentences have to follow this order:
Opinion / Size / Age / Shape / Colour / Origin / Material / Purpose
This is certainly not something that we learn as children trying to get our heads round other English grammar rules, such as when to use commas or the difference between their, they’re and there. In fact, it’s unlikely to be something that second-language learners of English are taught either. But eventually we come to know that adjectives sound ‘right’ in a certain order and ‘wrong’ when that order is disrupted. Try some sentences yourself based on the list above and you’ll see what we mean!
As always, there are a couple of exceptions, even to the rules that we don’t know we know. Take Little Red Riding Hood’s good friend the Big Bad Wolf as an example. Here we have size (big) coming before opinion (bad) and yet we wouldn’t ever say the Bad Big Wolf came to eat up Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma… The explanation for this involves another rule that tends to come naturally rather than being taught. When an English word is repeated but with a different vowel or consonant, for example lovey-dovey or mish-mash, there is an order in which those words must appear. The three vowels I, A and O must appear in that order – think chit-chat (not chat-chit), hip-hop (not hop-hip), sing song (not song sing), King Kong (not Kong King) and so on! This is why bad, big sounds so strange…
Be careful not to think about these rules too much because now you know you know them, you’ll be analysing the order of your adjectives non-stop!
https://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know
News Writer at Vividink
6 年Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools - wise words from one of the few.
Pension Consultant | Workplace Savings | Auto-enrolment | Employee Benefits | Medical & Group Risk | Financial Education and well-being | Mercer Marsh Benefits Chair Mentoring Committee | NextGen Pensions
6 年Never even thought about these but make so much sense when pointed out! Great article !
? 26 years' experience & expertise, helping businesses remove the stress & expense of localisation, by providing accurate specialist translation services on time, every time. Over 2600 clients helped so far! ??????????
6 年This is amazing... : )
Senior Translation Project Manager at Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd
6 年Mindblowing! I will just stick to my gut feeling, haha!