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This could be a reasonable comparison had you not chosen one of the irregular adjectives that places itself before the noun. The large majority of adjectives in

by __float 12y ago

This could be a reasonable comparison had you not chosen one of the irregular adjectives that places itself before the noun. The large majority of adjectives in French come after. (Though some can come in both positions, differing in meaning depending on placement.)

jpatokal 12y ago
"Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;) But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  It actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.) In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.
MBCook 12y ago
One of the few things I remember perfectly from my years taking French in middle/highschool is the idea of BANGS adjectives. If it's about Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness, or Size then it comes before the noun. If it's about something else such as color or temperature or whatever it comes after the noun. There are probably a few exceptions, but it worked remarkably well during my few years.

by __float 12y ago

jpatokal 12y ago

"Big red" was the example chosen by the article, not me. And it seems a rather reasonable choice to me, it's French that's being weird here ;) But the noun placement is actually irrelevant here, as the point is that "grand" still precedes "rouge", and you'd never say "rouge avion grand" or even "avion rouge grand".

stan_rogers 12y ago
It actually reinforces the rule, which is why linguistics requires a large number of languages for any sort of fundamental rules to emerge. Working from a single language, or from a very small set of languages that seem somehow to fit together if you apply enough force (like Latin and English), you wind up with those silly sentence diagrams I used to have to do in elementary school. (You know — the system that blew a fuse if you tried to use it on anything a human being would actually say in ordinary conversation.) In French it becomes easier both to see that "big" modifies the composite entity "red plane", and that there is a difference in kind between the two "adjectives" (which now looks like too broad a term to be really useful). It's not just a matter of word order (syntax), there's a semantic hierarchy in play as well.

MBCook 12y ago

One of the few things I remember perfectly from my years taking French in middle/highschool is the idea of BANGS adjectives. If it's about Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness, or Size then it comes before the noun. If it's about something else such as color or temperature or whatever it comes after the noun. There are probably a few exceptions, but it worked remarkably well during my few years.