More on word order

The last post touched on word order. Here’s a subtle rule in English about the order of adjectives when you use more than one to modify a noun. For example, this sounds wrong:

She gave him a golden old big star.

Somehow you know it should be:

She gave him a big old golden star.

Instead of color, age, size, it needs to be size, age, color.

Other languages do this sort of thing. German has the rule, “time before place.” French has a rather complicated set of rules for pronoun word order. Many languages place adjectives after the noun they refer to.

I hope you never feel the need to modify a noun with nine different adjectives, but here’s the order for them. You don’t need to use them all, but the ones you use should be in this order:

Opinion, Size, Age, Temperature, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose

Maybe you can think of a comfortable sentence that uses all nine. Put it in the comments.

By the way, I though of an exception: we say the big bad wolf. But that’s an idiom.

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This use of “whom” is correct. Why does it sound wrong?

Good old Dagwood. From Sept 2013

The reason is because word order is important in English. The rules of word order aren’t absolute in English, but we pretty strongly like to have the subject come right before the verb. Since we don’t use many inflections, word order steps in to tell us the function of a word. Lots of times we spell nouns and verbs exactly alike. Without word order, we can’t tell. Take “run,” for instance. is it a noun or a verb? Depends.

This dog run looks pretty clean.

Would you run to the store for me?

In front of the verb, “run” is a noun, a place for dogs to hang out. After the subject, it’s a verb, something you do.

Highly inflected languages, such as Greek, care less about word order. In fact in Greek, they have a figure of speech called “chiasmus,” which means to arrange the words in a symmetrical order by part of speech. For example: adjective, noun, adverb, verb, adverb, noun, adjective. You use the inflections to tell what goes with what. It’s pretty hard (though not utterly impossible) to do this in English.

So on to the Dagwood cartoon. “Whom” is in front of the verb “talking.” That makes it feel wrong, even though it’s right. Actually, the “to” is out of place. Literally the sentence is “Do you realize to whom you are talking?” Of course, that’s even stiffer than the original.

Ah English. Sometimes you just can’t win.

Here’s a comic I ran into recently.  The parrot got three things right that a lot of folks get wrong. Bizarro is generally pretty funny, by the way, and I recommend it.

The first thing is he mentioned himself first. Yes, this is opposite of an aside I made in a recent post about case. Normally, out of humility, you’re supposed to mention yourself last, but it’s not necessary to put yourself behind inanimate objects, and he’s talking mainly about himself anyway.

Second, he used the correct case. Many people would have said “With crackers and I…” and this is wrong. Object of a preposition—use “me.”

Third, a lot of folks would have missed the apostrophe in “a thousand’s.” It’s a contraction of “thousand is.”

Fourth, he didn’t point out that his mistress had eaten a few too many crackers herself.

We use the subjective (nominative) case for two things in English—the subject of a sentence or clause, which everyone gets pretty much correct pretty much all the time. The other place for the nominative is in a construction called the predicate nominative. Remember that term? I’ll explain it later. First we need two items of background.

First, think about how basic sentences are constructed in English. One basic sentence goes Subject, Verb, Direct Object. In that order. Since English has dropped a lot of inflectional endings, the order is usually important. Tom saw Mike is different from Mike saw Tom. (Notice that both names have the same form in both places) A lot of languages put a syllable or so at the end of a word to indicate how it’s used in the sentence. In Greek, for example, we might have something equivalent to Tomos saw Mikeon and Mikeos saw Tomon. That -os and -on are inflectional endings. It’s handy, in a way, to have inflectional endings because if you write Mikeon Tomos saw, your reader would know who saw whom without needing the word order. In fact the Greeks played with word order a lot because they could, with all those inflectional endings, and they had a lot of them.

Direct objects aren’t in the nominative case; they ‘re in the objective case, even if English doesn’t use an inflection to say so. Hence the ‘whom’ in the previous paragraph. That -m on whom is an inflectional ending. Literally, if I had written “who saw who.” I could have been writing about someone looking at his reflection in the mirror. (You might object that the reader can figure it out from the context. True, but that violates one of the main tenets of good writng. I mention it in that freebie order form in the right margin of this blog, but if you ask me directly, I’ll just tell you.)

When you think about word order, a predicate adjective looks a lot like a direct object.

Now the second bit of background, the verb “to be.” This word, in every language I have any acquaintance with, breaks a lot of rules that apply to most verbs. For one thing, it’s always irregular. You have to learn the different forms; it doesn’t follow the patterns most other verbs follow. We say, for example,  “I see, you see, he sees” but “I am, you are, he is.” No pattern.  Another thing about “to be” is that it is equivalent to an equals sign, but almost every other verb is equivalent to doing something. When Tom sees, he is doing something. But when Tom is the boss, that means Tom=boss.

Since both ends of a sentence containing some form of “to be” are equivalent, we use the nominative. We would say Tomos is the bossos.  The correct case is easier to remember in highly inflected languages. In English, where word order is so important, we get used to the pattern of having the objective case at the end of the sentence, so we tend use it all the time. “It’s me, Oh Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer” goes the song.

My Freshman English professor told this story:

St. Peter, at the pearly gates: Who’s there?

Person: “It is I.”

St. Peter: Ah, an English teacher!

So there you have it. Verbs of being take the nominative. Officially. I suppose it’s a losing battle, but at least now you know.

And I humbly beg the indulgence and forgiveness of you Greek scholars out there.