Rules of the English Language

#155

Rules of English we don't know we know:

Order of adjectives:

opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose noun

Example:

lovely little old triangular brown Greek steel whittling knife

Hence, while we may find it natural to say 'little green men on Mars', we'd find it awkward to hear 'green little men.'

However, while King Kong and Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, the Big Bad Wolf seems to be going against this law. How come in this case the 'Bad Big Wolf' sounds so wrong?

That's because its conforming to another linguistic law called ablaut reduplication.

It's when you repeat a word with consonants alternatively appearing like lovey-dovey or nitty-gritty. It also works with alternating vowels like ding-dang-dong. The order with three words has to be I, A, O, and I-A or I-O with two words like tic tac and flip-flop.

In school, we're only taught the basic set of tenses - simple, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous . TIL there's yet another tense call the 'pluperfect', which is used when an extended state of action happened prior to another action in the past. For instance, “I realised I had been being watched.” Rather daunting, eh? Especially for people learning English. They also have to learn things like we don't use the present tense for things occurring in the present! “I comb my hair” doesn’t mean that you’re doing it right now, it just means you do it regularly. We instead use the present continuous “I am combing my hair” for actions that are actually happening in that moment.

If you think this is hard enough to learn when English is not your native language, there come the exceptions. Enter the Auxiliary verbs. Verbs like ‘to think’ are sometimes used as an auxiliary e.g. “I think you’re right”. This is why you might tend to hear non-native speakers use phrases like “I am thinking that you are right”. It sounds a bit weird to us, that's only because we've had years and years of immersion learning, meaning we've learnt by being directly in that environment for a long enough period of time.

English is largely made up of rules we don’t know we know. Surprisingly, the rules we know we know are a rarity! Happy learning.