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Swimmer963 comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
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I used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.
I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.
Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.
Do you know the rule now why you say 'big brown' and not 'brown big'? I don't...I'm very curious though!
The rule I learned in French when I studied it was "BAGS" (beauty, age, goodness, size) adjectives come first. I think I tracked the application of this heuristic in English for a while and didn't notice any obvious contradictions, but I could easily have missed something.
Good heuristic.
Can still play with it a bit within BAGS...
Size and beauty sometimes seem to come before age: "a small, old lady" and "a pretty young thing" and size seems to come before prettiness: "a big ugly brute"
Yeah, more complicated than I'd ever considered before. great find!
French is special in that adjectives can go either before or after the noun; I don't know what the rule is but the one you give sounds right (though you'd say "une fille mignone" for "a cute girl", so I'm not sure it's the whole rule - there may be a finite set of adjectives (mostly short ones?) that are allowed to go in front).
In english though, adjectives are always in front, and I don't think the same rule works for their order: "Sad little boy" and "interesting old man" sound like a counter-examples, though your rule would work for the French translation. For most cases in English of "A1 A2 N" I can think of, the French translation is either "B A2 A1", "A2 B A1" or (more rarely) "A1 A2 N", which suggests that the "most important" adjective (A2) always stays closest to the noun, in French even going in front of it if it's very close.
So the rule in English would be the opposite of the rule in French :D (except for when both adjectives go in front of the noun in French, in which case their order is the same as in English).
ETA: this was probably wrong, I could think of plenty of counter-examples to those rules.
It's worth mentioning that the position of the same adjective in French (and other Romance languages) can vary, affecting the meaning to any degree from connotational nuance to literal denotation. A general rule taught to foreigners is that placing the adjective before the noun tends to suggest that the quality characterizes all members of the class denoted by the noun, while placing it after characterizes the individual specifically. (An example from the delightful old version of Teach Yourself French that sticks in my mind is savant professeur vs. professeur savant.)
Sometimes the adjective is placed before the noun as a kind of rhetorical flourish, as in assoluta innocenza, an Italian phrase I've had occasion to use.
Ah, that makes sense, though I can't think of that many constructions where that rule works: "Un curieux animal" and "un animal curieux" mean different things ("a curious-looking animal" and "an animal that seems to feel curious"), and I think that's a one-off rule more than an instance of a general rule.
I suspect some adjectives "naturally" go in front of the noun (those Alicorn listed), but you can put them behind it for extra emphasis; the rest always go behind. With a lot of idiomatic exceptions like "curieux" which means something different depending on whether it's before or after the noun.
Don't forget that event-related idioms can skew meaning as well...
I don't think there's any justification more interesting than "do it this way because that's how it's done", but if it helps, at least it's annoyingly complicated.
I think it would be because it's a "brown spider" more than a "big spider", i.e. "brown" would be more important/more permanent/more "fundamental" in describing it than "big".
That would explain why you would say a "sad little boy" and "short sad song" ("little boy" and "sad song" being "closer" descriptions of the object in question than if the order was reversed).
I'm not sure that's the full story though (the explanations on grammar we come up with are often wrong ), and don't know the "proper" linguistic explanation.
Surely the size of the spider is often the most fundamental aspect? "Don't look now, but there's a huge brown spider behind you." If "big spider" were a species then it's inseparable (as benelliott points out) because it's a species name, but that's a different story. I wouldn't talk about a green enormous chameleon even if I knew that the chameleon was about to change colors without changing its size.
I think this work. To test it, imagine if there was a specific species of spider called "big spiders" and one of them was brown. I would then consider "brown big spider" to be more appropriate.
Marius makes a good point with the chameleon - Although when describing something as skinny/fat the color comes first (Red Faced Fat Man vs. Large/Huge Red-faced man)
Almost seems to me that we place words that categorize the object closest to the object - Brown Spider/Green Chameleon/Fat Man are all categories of those objects whereas a Big spider isn't as much of a category as it describes the size of the spider relative to other spiders in the same category.