coordinate adjectives

ablaut reduplication Kinney Brothers Publishing

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To understand this anomaly, we’ll need to review a few grammar points. Bear with me and you’ll come to a sparkling revelation by the end of the post.

Adjectives

An adjective is a word or phrase that describes a noun, e.g., small, red, or awesome. When using multiple adjectives in a sentence, there are two orders: coordinate and cumulative adjectives.

Coordinate adjectives are in the same category and require a comma between each one:

My dog is brown, black, and white. (color)
This is a Spanish, English, and French dictionary. (purpose)
He’s intelligent, handsome, funny, and a great dancer! (opinion)

Cumulative adjectives come from various categories and don’t require commas, but must be ‘stacked’ in a specific order:

Opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Origin
Material
Purpose

This is a cute little blue bag.
We rode two gorgeous big black Arabian horses.
I have a tiny 10-week-old brown beagle puppy.

Reduplicates

Reduplication is when a word or part of a word is repeated and sometimes modified to make a longer term, like hush-hush or boogie-woogie. There are two types of reduplicates: exact and rhyming.

Exact: goody-goody, choo-choo, bye-bye, wee-wee, yum-yum, aye-aye, boo-boo, so-so, tut-tut, no-no, night-night, poo-poo, yada-yada, ta-ta
Rhyming: okey-dokey, itsy-bitsy, arty-farty, razzle-dazzle, fancy-schmancy, walkie-talkie, raggle-taggle, super-duper, boo-hoo

Interestingly, there are a large number of ‘h’ words in the rhyming group: hocus-pocus, hanky-panky, hokey-pokey, hoity-toity, higglety-pigglety, harem-scarem, helter-skelter, holy-moly, honey-bunny, hum-drum, Handy Andy, Humpty Dumpty, and Henny Penny.

Ablaut Reduplication

Ablaut is a term introduced by the 19th-century German linguist, Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm duo. Ablaut refers to a vowel change which, in reduplicates, often follows a particular vowel pattern, such as zigzag or sing-song. If there are two words, the first vowel is I and the second is usually either A or O. If there are three words then the order is often I, A, O.

Two-Word: flim-flam, knick-knack, mingle-mangle, dilly-dally, pitter-patter, chit-chat, Tic Tac, wishy-washy, criss-cross, flip-flop, tick-tock, ping pong, clippity-cloppity, bibbity-bobbity, King Kong
Three-Word: bing-bang-bong, ding-dang-dong, bish-bash-bosh, splish-splash-splosh, clink-clank-clunk

We have our Germanic/Old English heritage to thank for this familiar vowel pattern. A similar vowel shift occurs with verb conjugations like drink, drank, drunk (trinken, tranken, getrunken) or sing, sang, sung (singen, sang, gesungen).

The Anomaly of The Big Bad Wolf

If we understand that cumulative adjectives are stacked in a specific order, a sentence with the words bad (opinion), big (size), and wolf (noun) should read, “bad big wolf.” This logic holds true for “cute little kittens,” “scary old house,” or “nice long drive.” So, why are the two adjectives in “big bad wolf” flipped? The writer, Mark Forsyth, explains this phenomenon in his title, The Elements of Eloquence:

“The reason “big bad wolf” is reversed is that the phrase skips the stacked-order rule to follow the ablaut reduplicative I-A scheme where big-bad acts like zig-zag!”

It would be easy to assume this anomalous ordering is the way it’s always been said, until you look at early versions of The Three Little Pigs. In Jacob’s English Fairy Tales (1890), the story includes “not by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin” and lots of huffing and puffing, but not the phrase “big bad wolf.” In the much older Grimm’s Fairy Tales version, you’ll find the piggy threesomes’ “Tra-la-la!” refrain, as well as the agreeably-ordered “wicked black wolf,” but no “big bad wolf.” So, when did this happen?

In 1933, the song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” was featured in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony rendition of The Three Little Pigs. The theme song was a Depression-era hit and continues to be one of Disney’s most well-known songs. So successful was the animation, the studio spun several sequels. The theme song was repeated in The Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood, and Li’l Bad Wolf, the son of Big Bad Wolf. Unsurprisingly, the wolf pup inherited his father’s ablaut reduplication, further cementing the adjectival reversal in our collective memories.

So, now you know! (I was going to say “That’s all folks!” but remembered that’s a different pig altogether.)

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, test your own knowledge of stacked adjectives, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students! Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

Go the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives. In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order if accumulative. When they fall out of that order, the brain glitches, and the meaning can be lost, confused, or even misconstrued.

Adjectives

We learn in school that adjectives fall into categories, such as color, size, shape, age, etc. When multiple adjectives are used in a sentence, they appear in one of two types of groups: coordinate or cumulative adjectives.

An example of coordinate adjectives is, “It’s a black, brown, and white cat.” The adjectives are all in the same category of color, can be understood in any order, and must be separated with commas.

“I have two cute little pink pigs,” is a sentence with cumulative adjectives. With each successive adjective, categorical information is accumulated about the noun they modify and don’t require commas between them. The crux of stacked adjectives is the order that they are expected to appear.

Stacked Adjectives

Though there’s nothing semantically different between “a white big house” and “a big white house,” the second aligns itself to an English speaker’s internal ordering of adjectives – the result of a linguistic potty training we don’t even remember. An invisible code snaps into place and an adjectival conga line forms with all the modifiers in a proper queue:

Quantity or number
Quality or opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Proper adjective (nationality, place of origin, or material)
Purpose or qualifier

There are linguists and laymen alike who oppose this strict order, such as size after opinion, arguing that a person is no less correct or clear in saying “a mean little dog” or “a little mean dog.” Nonetheless, patterns are imprinted from an early age and set with children’s stories like My Naughty Little Sister or Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse. (There is the curious case of “the big bad wolf” that doesn’t follow the size after opinion rule. That is the subject of another Fun Facts About English.)

Adjective order is still flexible enough for changing the character or meaning of an object being described. For example, a “fake Japanese watch” is a knock-off of a Japanese-made watch, but a “Japanese fake watch,” is a thing (dummy, toy, or phony) from Japan masquerading as a watch.

It would be impossible for most of us to elucidate this adjectival order, though we employ it in our language every day. Take the following sentence for example:

“This is a yellow new French cotton handsome jacket.”

It’s difficult to discern what the sentence is trying to convey and comes off like an adjective salad. In their proper order, the descriptors should be aligned thusly:

“This is a handsome new yellow French cotton jacket.”

Of course, one can stack adjectives so high that it becomes a categorical nightmare to mentally sort — whether you’re listening or speaking. This is why it’s often recommended that we limit the number of adjectives in a sentence to keep the lingual conveyor moving smoothly, for example:

“This is a handsome new yellow jacket. It’s from France and made of cotton.”

The Test

Imagine that you’re a foreign speaker of English. You’ve spent weeks memorizing adjectival order to answer test questions like the five below. Marvel at the sorting function that activates in your native English brain! The answers are below. Good luck and let me know your score in the comments!

Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. We took a ride on a green old Korean bus.
B. We took a ride on a Korean old green bus.
C. We took a ride on an old green Korean bus.
Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. My brother rode a beautiful big black Arabian horse in the parade.
B. My brother rode a beautiful Arabian big black horse in the parade.
C. My brother rode a big black beautiful Arabian horse in the parade.

For the next three questions, insert the adjectives that are in the correct order.
I bought a pair of _________________boots.
A. new nice yellow rain
B. nice new yellow rain
C. yellow nice new rain
Put the money into that __________________box.
A. little old round red
B. round little old red
C. little old red round
She was surprised to get a ________________ puppy for her birthday!
A. little beagle cute ten-week-old
B. cute ten-week-old little beagle
C. cute little ten-week-old beagle

Answers: 1-C, 2-A, 3-B, 4-A, 5-C

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, why Big Bad Wolf follows a different adjectival order, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students! Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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