The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
Edit: couldn't decide on the number of shoes so I went for both singular and plural :(
It's still a judgment call whether they properly belong in different categories, and situation-dependent, so it's really not something that merits the "point and laugh" treatment.
> The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
* Worstest? Most least?
> The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
* The smallest shoe confused her. How could it be so smallest?!
> In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
* Outside the wooden red house was a brick grey ancient barn.
The last one is especially interesting-- if you're a native English speaker, I'll wager that "brick ancient barn" sounds nearly as ungrammatical as "brick the barn", but it's a lot harder to explain why.
Edit: Some more decisive examples of that from replies, since some have rightly pointed out that "brick ancient barn" is semi-acceptable in context:
* "grain lone silo", "fish dry pond", "beef tasty stew", "laptop lost bag", "horse leather saddle" / "leather horse saddle" (both grammatical, but different meanings)
native speakers of english will find that "red wooden house" is favored over "wooden red house", the same way the "big red dog" is favored over "red big dog".
There's an ordering to adjectives that has something to do with how important the adjective is to the identity or distinctiveness of the modified object.
A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.
"Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics.
Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compoun... . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole.
My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving by eating turkey. Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide, genocide is bad and should be stopped, QED". Stick to honest examples, and you'll find the problems you're talking about are rather muted. Don't let your feeling that the problems are large, and you therefore need extremely malformed examples, lead you into choosing examples that are extremely malformed because they exhibit a completely different problem.
To the extent I'm arguing something non-disingenuous, it's just that language is best analyzed with a bit of a fuzzy lens, and words don't fit into neat boxes.
Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike") that can be used to indicate an action ("I was hiking"), the performer or target of an action ("I don't hate hiking, hiking hates me") or as a modifier for something else ("those crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking boots").
On what basis do you say that it is a noun? Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning? "The boots aren't hiking, they're for hiking"? Clearly-- in this phrase, the word "hiking" means the boots are for hiking!
To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class. I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, since it explains things well enough and we might never have something like universal gravitation to set the record straight.
What I'm saying is, I don't think I have a problem.
Except, of course, when the "rules of grammar" are used as a proxy to cast minorities and lower-class people as unintelligent. That, I have a problem with, and it's quite a popular pastime in the English-speaking world. That's why I think it's important to think scientifically about the extent to which grammar is, and is not, a real thing. (Including, sometimes, hypothesizing things that don't make sense, just to see what happens.)
I wouldn't say you're wrong about this. However, I'd be much more willing to defend the idea that, as it appears here, "hiking" is a one-word noun phrase containing a verb form (and that compound nouns are formed NP-NP, not N-N). Traditional grammar has gifted us with a rich vocabulary of specialized terms for specialized syntactic functions, and the traditional term for a verb form which functions as a noun is "gerund". (Um, technically, infinitive forms can also function as nouns.)
I'll pause here to defend myself from an argument you haven't made: there are people who will say that "beef" in "beef stew" is an adjective simply because it modifies a noun. They're wrong. I say that a gerund really is a verb form acting as a noun. The difference is that I'm saying that gerunds can appear in basically all syntactic contexts that permit noun phrases, so the definition I'm using is syntactic (as appropriate for a syntactic term of art like "noun") rather than semantic. I'm not saying gerunds are nouns because they refer to objects -- I'm saying they're nouns because they can be the subjects of verbs (and otherwise appear where nouns appear). To me, the best analysis is just that noun phrases can be constructed from verb forms. Linking back to the subject at hand, I'd agree that "hiking", the word, is not a noun in the same way that "iron", the word, is one, but I am saying that this "hiking", as used in context, is just as much of a noun phrase as "this rusted iron" is.
> Specifically, when looking at the list "crummy old worn-out tan leather gusseted hiking", with modifiers lined up in order of significance, what about the word "hiking" jumps out at you as plainly different in use or meaning?
In all honesty, what jumps out at me is that all of the others are descriptions, while it would be odd to use "hiking" that way. For example, in a certain style of speech, you could see something like this:
Get out and take your crummy, old, worn-out, leather, gusseted, boots with you.
But it's completely impossible for the "hiking" of "hiking boots" to be delimited by commas (in speech, emphatic pauses) that way. If you did it, the meaning of "hiking" would change -- it would mean that the boots were out on a hike. This demonstrates that "hiking" is not a descriptor for "boots" -- rather, "hiking boots" is a single unit. (Yes, with internal structure.)
> To me, the most intellectually honest thing is to see compound nouns as a sort of epicycle-style theory to explain why words in our non-modifier class are actually used as modifiers all the time, just according to a subtly different set of rules than applies to the modifier class.
English is way more liberal with modifiers than that.
He gave me his I'm-going-to-kill-you look.
When we're young we absorb language the way we experience it, in an informal and cultural way. I think in any attempt to categorize aspects of language this basic character has to be respected (which it is in linguistics, being fundamental to it, but which it isn't in e.g. English canon).
Accepting that one's language is actually a messy evolution-convolution of ancient languages is easier for some than others. :D
Edit: this is in reference to "brick the barn". Grammatical if nonsensical. "Brick ancient barn" is of course weird and wrong unless you really want to emphasize that this is a brick ancient barn and not a wooden ancient barn like all the other ancient barns. The normal adjective order can be deviated from for emphasis. My point was that that didn't work when "the" was one of the "adjectives".
(I've been trying to fall asleep for hours so I make mistakes left and right -- I apologize for not being clear about the word list I referred to.)
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"Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dream of inserting pretentious spaces between the constituent parts.
I actually thought of "stone chimney" as a compound noun instead of adjective + noun when I wrote it, precisely because I wanted to mock that and really hammer home the point. Unfortunately, the two look the same in English (but not in Danish) -- and I was tired -- so I didn't catch it and replace it with a better example.
Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there.
Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)
Most people would be comfortable saying "ancient grey brick barn".