Splish Splash Splosh
(7-minute read)
English is widely spoken; it isn’t easy to learn. Even native speakers can be caught unable to explain our word choices – we speak almost entirely intuitively, rather than logically.
If I asked a native-English speaker to point out their brothers to me, they might say something like, “They’re the two chatty young Northern men carrying huge pink shopping bags”.
Native-English speakers would likely find it odd if the answer was instead, “They’re the young Northern chatty two men carrying shopping pink huge bags”. The order of the adjectives (the describing words) helps us to get our messages across more clearly. We find the order or the words in the second example confusing… but can we explain why?
Adjective Order
Below are six adjectives (in no particular order) which could all be used to describe apples.
- Huge
- Cooking
- Red
- 30
- European
- Beautiful
- Round
- Young
Can you put them in the prescribed order? Before you continue reading, open the notes tab on your phone and write the words down in the order you’d say them instinctively. Most native-English speakers follow a rule about adjective order without even realising, one we likely picked up without having been deliberately taught it.
The rule essentially states that adjectives (describing words) listed immediately before nouns (things/people/places mostly) must follow the following pattern: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Incredibly, unlike many grammar rules, we very rarely deviate from this one even in informal settings and casual chat.
Imagine trying to learn a second language and being told of a convention like this – eek!
That being said, as a native-English speaker, I don’t always follow the prescribed adjective-order; the longer the list, the harder it gets. For example, I’d know to say ‘Thirty beautiful red European cooking apples’, but I’m unsure if I’d necessarily arrive at the prescribed ‘Thirty beautiful huge young round red European cooking apples’ without some conscious thought.
But there’s more! In a classic ‘language is fucking awesome’ turn of events, we find an exception to the usual adjective-order rule.
I know – what could possibly override the reliable comfort of ordered adjectives? How could we ever tolerate the discomfort of a hot nice bath or a tub of chocolate delicious ice cream?
The answer, keen reader, is the big bad wolf of linguistics: ablaut reduplication (wait… shouldn't that be ‘bad big’ wolf?).
Wtf Is Ablaut Reduplication?
The word ablaut pertains to the long history of why we see vowel gradation (changes) in related words such as sing/sang/sung/song, man/men, and photograph/photography.
You might have come to your own fairly accurate definitions of reduplication, but I’ll humour you. Broadly speaking, reduplication is the repetition of a word (or part of a word) with either slight or zero change. This can serve a stunning multitude of functions across languages almost universally (it's a Wikipedia page worthy of your afternoon), but we see it in English for childlike emphasis in phrases such as night night, bye bye, and super duper.
Ablaut reduplication, then, is the deliberate placement of high vowels before low vowels in paired words (think flip flop, ping pong, and dilly dally). There's a reason we weren't playing toe-tac-tic on our desks in detention.
Imagine how uncomfortable you'd have been if Bob Dylan came following you in the jangle jingle morning.
This quirky little oddity is so unbending that it overrules adjective order to give us rare exceptions like the infamous Big Bad Wolf.
English isn’t a tonal language (though it does utilise word and syllable stress), but we still have some subconscious sense of the difference between a high vowel (such as the ‘i’ sound in ‘tin’) and a low vowel (such as the ‘o’ sound in ‘clock’). This offers artistic license within a non-tonal language to create intuitively poetic, somehow onomatopoeic meter in combinations like clip-clop, tick-tock, and, by no coincidence, hip-hop.
Exceptions to Every Rule
Of course, just as ablaut reduplication gives us exceptions to prescribed adjective order, there are exceptions to ablaut reduplication. When I first arrived in Australia, I could not wrap my head around the famous sun-safety campaign slogan, ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!’ because my brain would auto-correct the vowel order and I’d end up slip-slap-slopping instead.
I’m yet to find a prescribed rule of the English language that doesn’t have exceptions. These exceptions are borne out of creativity. Language can be playful, and the rule of ablaut reduplication is a beautiful example of this. Breaking such ‘rules’ can be equally playful (see Spike Milligan’s ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’). The prescribed set of rules is a helpful guide which we can used to keep our communications clear and accurate, but as soon as a rule stops serving as an aide for amplifying and clarifying your message, leave it behind! With this simple dismissal of today’s outdated rules, we can rewrite tomorrow’s rulebook.