Order of Adjectives

[jcb]

Adjectives in English follow a certain order. I found images like this that describe an order, but I think it's somewhat incomplete and incorrect, so I've revised it into this order:

(order) kind - example
(1) determiner/possessor - a, the, this, my, John's
(2) number - one, two
(3) size - big, tall, wide, heavy, long?
(4) goodness - good, bad
(5) opinion/other - beautiful, delicious, rich, cold, responsible
(6) age - young, old
(7) shape - round, flat, long?
(8) color - red, blue
(9) material - wood(en), silver, glass
(10) origin - English, French
(11) purpose - writing, cooking
(12) (noun)
(13) prepositional phrase - in the house
(14) relative pronoun clause - that I want

Examples:

- these two big delicious red apples on the tree that I want to pick
- John's young yellow Labrador retriever with a wide flat brown nose
- the good responsible young man
- my heavy comfortable green couch
- Trump's big beautiful wall
- the long cold metal butter knife
- an old round red glass Christmas ornament
- my small blue wooden French writing table
- the long bumpy road to nowhere

I'm somewhat unsure of the order of places 3 to 7. Both of the following sound fine:

- long beautiful blonde hair
- beautiful long blonde hair

(Perhaps this is because "long" can be interpreted as both size and shape?)

And so do the various permutations of the adjectives in the following:

- the tall hot young woman
- the smelly old leftovers

But I'm not sure why. It seems that the places 3-7 seem less rigid than the other places.

Questions:
(1) Do you agree with this order?
(2) Do other languages have an popular order for adjectives? If so, is the order similar to that of English?
(3) Do languages that place most of their adjectives after their noun (like Spanish) have a significantly different order of adjectives relative to each other?

PS: Sorry for the multiple early posts that I immediately deleted. I kept hitting enter outside of the text area by accident, which triggered the submission.

[foxcatdog]

Goodness and Opinion are the same slot for me and i struggle to think of any one where you would use both good/bad and an opinion adjective

[zompist]

When you have a proposed syntactic rule you should try to break it. I think this type is more breakable than most.

If something is topicalized or lexicalized it can violate the rules.
"I'm supposed to fix a bad recipe from my country, but there are no Chinese bad recipes."
"A long song, even a beautiful long song, won't get played on the radio."
"English tin soldiers are better than French ones."

Are Red Delicious apples an exception?

I observed in the SCK that apparent violations can be improved with pauses:
"I'm looking for a French... red... round house."

You can find exceptions with some Googling.
"Hot, blue, young stars, as well as the gas and dusty cocoons in which they are forming, are on display in this UV view of Andromeda captured by GALEX."
"Learn how to make traditional English wooden eating spoons with Eric Rogers."
"This exquisite golden beautiful flower is the perfect way to add a unique and vibrant touch to any special occasion or home decor."
"French rich kids don't work at Starbucks!"
"But suppose now that on a different occasion I see a blue round thing and a red square thing."

[Creyeditor]

German supposedly also has some fixed order but counterexamples due to noun phrase-internal information structure are much more common than in English, at least in my idiolect.

[xxx]

in French, adjectives can be placed before or after the noun,
which makes things even more complicated...
before the noun is when they are short and essential to the noun,
after when they are epithets in order of importance...

[Travis B.]

I'm with zompist on this one ─ to try to specify an absolute fixed order to this kind of thing is bound to fail. A tendency, sure, but it will always be easy to come up with counterexamples.

[WeepingElf]

I think I read somewhere that in French, adjectives before the noun had a more figurative meaning than adjectives after the noun with a more literal meaning, as in Immanuel Kant était un homme petit, mais un grand homme. But that is probably an over-simplification of a more complex fact.

[alice]

I think I read somewhere that in French, adjectives before the noun had a more figurative meaning than adjectives after the noun with a more literal meaning, as in Immanuel Kant était un homme petit, mais un grand homme. But that is probably an over-simplification of a more complex fact.

This is probably common to Romance languages in general.

[bradrn]

I think I read somewhere that in French, adjectives before the noun had a more figurative meaning than adjectives after the noun with a more literal meaning, as in Immanuel Kant était un homme petit, mais un grand homme. But that is probably an over-simplification of a more complex fact.

To my understanding, most adjectives are restricted to following the noun — it’s only some which can go before and after the noun. Of these, the position makes no difference for most. My reference grammar lists about 30 where the position changes the meaning.

[Ares Land]

To my understanding, most adjectives are restricted to following the noun — it’s only some which can go before and after the noun. Of these, the position makes no difference for most. My reference grammar lists about 30 where the position changes the meaning.

Also some adjectives (short, common ones) are placed almost always before the noun. I'd argue there's almost always a change in meaning, if a slight one.

This is probably common to Romance languages in general.

Yes. It's true of Spanish and Italian, at least.

[Ketsuban]

I saw a post on Reddit that reminded me of this thread. The creator of the thread had apparently been on a tear complaining about one game character in particular (a Korean man named 장거한 Chang Koehan) and this person was fed up with it. (Emphasis mine.)

You again? Has your bitch slept with a Korean fat dude?

This struck me as a violation of the usual rule for adjective order in English (which would be "fat Korean dude") but I can't see a pragmatic reason for it. They're not comparing him to slimmer Korean dudes, and they're not trying to be offensive about Koreans - it's just a description of Mr Chang.