Re: off topic: Grammer Question

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Good for your mother. Is there ever a need (I've taught courses to
"experienced editors" who didn't know a relative from a personal
pronoun).

Order of adjectives is often a matter of idiom: the (often arbitrary)
traits peculiar to a given language. There are sometimes patterns that
can be cited; for example, color adjectives usually come closest to the
noun: "big green door, small white house, large blue shutters; large,
fragrant, pale yellow flowers; small, sharp, black spines." Contrast
this with French, where, I'm told (only had 2 years of it, in high
school, some 50 years ago) not merely are "le cordon bleu" and "le bleu
cordon" both possible, but that pair have passed into proverb as the
French equivalent of English "six of one, half-dozen of the other."

On the other hand, Flash cites
"the green wooden door"
And that is idiomatic. In so far as there is a principle, it would seem
to be that the adjective denoting the quality most intrinsic to the noun
comes closest (anybody else remember substance and the nine accidents
from Aristotle's Categories)? Size is least essential, color
moderately, composition most. But idiom is never logical, leat of all in
English. It's just the done thing.

By the by, Flash is very right to cite German. Though all the
Indo-European languages have a great deal of grammar in common (that
verbs should agree with their subjects in person and number is not
peculiar to English; the rule holds in Latin, Greek, French, German--and
I dare say in Palaeo-Hittite), and though English _vocabulary_ is more
than half, at least, of Latin origin, either directly or through
Norman-French, still, English is a Germanic language, and other Germanic
languages can throw great light on it. (It was a consideration of
separable and inseparable prefixes in German that finally convinced me
that "not ending a sentence with a preposition" was a pedantic
superstition.)

The one authority who does have something on the subject is Theodore
Bernstein, in the Careful Writer, under Adjectives, placement of,
but what he discusses there is predicate adjectives: adjectives that
complete a copulative verb (his lead example is "his driving was inexpert
of the car").

Michael Edwards wrote:
Modern American
Usage, under Commas: Superposed versus Parallel Adjectives (pp.401-3
in the 1st ed.)

Idiom is not something that, IMO, can be taught: it can only be picked up
from reading and hearing good English (or any other language). Grammar
(in the strict sense; i.e., rules of concord, formation and sequence of
tenses, case formation and use) can be taught, since there are rules,
exceptions to the rules (lots of them in English), and a certain logic.
Syntax, idiom, semantics, orthography (spelling)--which along with
etymology are often classed as "grammar" in a wider sense--pretty much
have to be learned by ear, though there are a few rules of English
spelling ("i before e except after c or when sounded as ay as in neighbor
and weigh"). (Etymology is a matter of fact, though the facts can
sometimes be controverted.)

Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx