The big, red ball bounced vs The red, big ball bounced. For most of us the former sounds correct and the latter wrong/unusual. Why is this? Are there rules?
Yes, there are "rules," although since they're not usually written down they fall more under the category of "the syntactic structure of the language." As I recall, Strunk & White alludes to them but doesn't go into much detail. I don't have a copy at home and the online version seems to be an urban legend.
Every editor or English teacher will tell you that an adjective describing size comes before an adjective describing age, which comes before an adjective describing color, which comes before an adjective describing material or construction: The big old red wooden house. There are probably a couple of other categories of adjectives I'm not remembering that also fit into a standard hierarchy. But beyond that, this syntactic hierarchy seems to be something that we just "know," the way we "know" that you found this website
on the internet, not
in the internet.
If the adjectives do indeed fit into a hierarchy then you're free to concatenate them because everyone will understand your sentence. But if not, then you have to use commas: "The big, expensive, dilapidated, beautiful old red wooden house."
It occurred to me that in Old English they had compound words like longhouse or something.
So do we: doghouse, footstool, birdseed, lawnmower, housewife, surfboard. The newer the compound, the more likely we are to write it with a space (high school, toilet paper), but it still functions grammatically as a single word.
This is a common word-building engine throughout the Germanic group of Indo-European languages. The Germans themselves take it to an entertaining extreme with foot-long compounds of four or five words, but we shove pairs of words together instinctively all the time.
Compound words are a hallmark of the
analytic languages, which express the relationships among ideas by simply putting the words that describe them one on top of the other. Chinese is the most famous example of this. Virtually every thought is expressed by a compound of two or three individual morphemes, and many have more: "motorcycle" is
ji qi jiao ta che, "gas engine leg propel vehicle," a second-generation compound of "motor-bicycle."
Most of the Indo-European languages have at least a modest ability to form compound words, although few match German or Chinese (which of course is Sino-Tibetan, not Indo-European). Latin and Greek had it, and we have not only inherited thousands of their compounds but we make up new ones like "television," Greek "distance" plus Latin "sight." But the modern Romance languages have largely lost the feature, preferring to link their words with prepositions or grammatical inflections--except of course for using the same made-up Latin-Greek compounds we use.
So maybe we have this in our speech DNA, to link the adjective nearest the noun to form a new kind of idea, leaving it in the nominative format, so to speak.
This is facilitated by the fact that our nouns don't actually have case declensions: there's no difference between nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative, etc.
Only our pronouns retain a stripped down three-case paradigm: he/his/him, they/their/them. You can call the apostophe-S possessive ending on a noun the genitive case, but it's a faint echo of a true declension system, especially since it breaks down completely in the plural except in writing: birds' versus birds versus bird's.
