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Comment by dsfas | Hacker News Reader

"Worstest" seems to be a morphological problem. "Most least" could be permissible, if somewhat exotic sounding, I think, if "least" is read with its adjectival meaning―"used in names of very small animals and plants, e.g., least shrew"―so eg. most least shrew. "So smallest" doesn't work with any other superlative ("most reddest") that I can imagine off the top of my head. And "brick ancient barn" is an unusual order but not ungrammatical, though it is interesting. (It sounds more like listing adjectives, ie. I'd read a larger pause after "brick" and stress on "ancient", than the other order. MATERIAL AGE NOUN seems to read awkwardly.)

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If "brick ancient barn" is too plausible for you to get the full effect, try something with more diverse adjectives like "beef tasty stew" or "laptop lost bag".

You really do like fake examples. Can you point to a syntactician making the argument that the "beef" of "beef stew", or the "laptop" of "laptop bag", is an adjective? In any context I'm familiar with, that person would be laughed out of the room.

Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?

"Hiking boots" has the same problem -- the boots aren't themselves hiking, they're boots for use in hiking. That's another noun-noun compound.

"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.

Well, yeah, I jumped in to defend the idea that the word "the" counts as an adjective. It seems vaguely possible that my argument is not backed by much besides bluster. (And of course the downvotes are my just reward.)

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.)

> Take your claim that "hiking" is a noun: To me, it analyzes as an inflection of a verb ("hike")

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.

(In actual rhetoric, the descriptors would probably be different.)

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.

I agree that language requires a bit of a fuzzy lens. But grammar is very much a real thing.

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