jmmcd comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Swimmer963 14 March 2011 08:03PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (152)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 March 2011 04:15:02AM 7 points [-]

Yes, I only recently found out that English has rules for adjectival order, and was shocked to realize it. I always did it without thinking. Apparently as a general rule of thumb, the more subjective something is the earlier it should go. But that's not all, since apparently age always goes after subjective opinion but always before colors. And there are lots of other priority rules. I'm waiting for someone to construct an example where one has adjectives in pairs that exhibit non-transitive order.

Comment author: jmmcd 15 March 2011 06:44:10PM *  0 points [-]

The idea of non-transitivity sounds really interesting -- can you point to an explanation of the supposed rules?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 March 2011 07:36:51PM *  0 points [-]

This has a rough summary of the rules. If the rules are as hierarchical as they suggest then there aren't any non-transitive issues. But there are some adjectives that don't fall into those categories.