What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/) (I couldn’t find the link to the actual comic)
Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
What about similar oddities in English?
(This question is inspired by this comic by https://www.exocomics.com/) (I couldn’t find the link to the actual comic)
Edit: it’s to its in the title. Damn autocorrect.
One of my favourites is the word jam, which can mean:
And probably others, all spelled and pronounced the same way but with wildly different meanings depending on the context.
The other English thing I find super interesting is how there’s a sort of unspoken but very clearly understood order to adjectives. So for example, if I say “The big old red wooden door” it works as a description, but if I say “The wooden old red big door” it sounds weird even though it’s the same information. People aren’t usually formally taught the order (as far as I know), but everyone seems to understand it.
Would be interested in more about the order - wondering if there is a name for that? I have been called out by teachers and friends and colleagues about strange sentences and it was often because I wouldn’t write the ‘normal’ way. I’ve learned the conventions over the years and often find myself making edits to swap words and phrases around to meet expectations.
Apparently it’s called the Royal Order of Adjectives, and it’s essentially: determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, qualifier.
You don’t have to use all of those in the description, but that’s broadly the order to use them in to make it sound ‘right’. So for example in the comment I made above, it fits because I used:
in that order. I’m sure I was never taught that in any organized way (I just had to look up what it was called lol) but I still got it in the right order anyway just by typing it out in the way that felt right, which I think is interesting.