Is English illogical for placing the adjectives before the noun?

An important necessity for thinking or communicating about philosophical issues such as reality and epistemology is that we need a language in order to do so.

This site therefore spends a little time considering the issues of languages. This site is English based, and foreign languages certainly aren’t one of CK’s strengths, but like most educated people he’s spent large numbers of hours learning other languages, and has come to appreciate some of the issues of comparative languages as a philosophical field.

The truth is that the languages with which we have sufficient familiarity to be able to ‘think’ in them, heavily affect the conceptual models we build in our mind through which we then consciously view the world. So having a good language with good grammar helps. Unfortunately, good languages are in short supply on Earth. Plenty more on that in our Oracle.

Celestial Koan is an author and spends a lot of time wrestling with the distressing complexities of the English language. Through a combination of good and historical reasons (historical reasons frequently aren’t good) English has become the lingua franca of the world for aviation, diplomacy, computer programming, and the rest. So I will occasionally blog about the strengths and weaknesses of English as a language.

Someone who’s first language isn’t English raised the issue on Quora that they thought it more logical that the noun (being more important) should precede the noun qualifiers (the adjectives). They suggested that the English practice of placing the adjectives before the noun was illogical. Clearly they are used to a language which has these grammatical rules, and are therefore familiar with them. They are struggling to handle the complicated way English handles the structure between nouns and adjectives.

The grammatical structure where the noun always precedes the adjectives is perfectly reasonable, and gives you sentences like:

Now Tom was a lad tall.

rather than the way we would generally express it in English:

Now Tom was a tall lad.

So far so good. However, lets load up the adjectives a bit and see what we get. The English statement,

Now Tom was a tall strapping handsome lad.

would be

Now Tom was a lad tall strapping handsome.

There certainly are plenty of languages where that is the correct and only correct grammatical structure, and you are stuck with it. It’s perfectly workable. It’s also somewhat restrictive.

That English is a language that’s very easy to learn badly, and truly difficult to master, is an oft repeated theme on this site. Here’s another example of the issues. English is flexible. It doesn’t restrict you to placing adjectives before the noun. It is perfectly acceptable to write:

Now Tom was a lad, tall, strapping and handsome.

As an author, that sentence in that structure has a far more appealing ring to it.

And English also doesn’t restrict us to simple nouns. We can replace ‘lad’ with ‘young man’ and remain comfortable thus:

Now Tom was a tall strapping and handsome young man.

Or

Now Tom was a tall young man, both strapping and handsome.

So we can really load in the adjectives and create a complex sentence along the lines of:

Now when Tom met Sally he was a tall strapping young man, handsome, generous to a fault, with a kindly disposition.

Or one can write:

Now when Sally met the tall strapping and very handsome young man of a kindly disposition, and reputedly generous to a fault, it took her little time to discover his name was Tom.

I had to throw in that alternative to forestall the argument that ‘young man’ is itself adjectives rather than a noun. Young is indeed an adjective qualifying the noun man, but please note that I have simply substituted the noun ‘lad’ with the term ‘young man’, because that’s what a ‘lad’ means. If ‘lad’ is a noun, then ‘young man’ is simply being substituted for the noun.

Now let’s try putting that in a grammatical structure where adjectives must always follow the noun. We get:

Now when Tom met Sally he was a man young tall strapping, generous to a fault, with kindly disposition.

and

Now when Sally met the man young tall strapping and very handsome, of kindly disposition and reputedly generous to a fault, it took her time little to discover his name given was Tom.

Well - okay. It has a certain logic to it, but is it more logical? Certainly it’s more restrictive. Certainly one has less scope to balance the sentence.

As an author I’d be more inclined to finally write:

Now when Sally met the tall strapping and handsome young man of kindly disposition, and a reputation for generosity to a fault, it took her little time to discover his given name was Tom.

As one can see, I’ve loaded a whole lot of adjectives, qualifiers, descriptive clauses, or whatever one wants to call it, around the one noun - ‘man’ or ‘young man’ rather than ‘lad’. And yet the sentence is balanced, it flows, and it isn’t overly difficult to read and comprehend. We’ve achieved a usefully comprehensive description of the important aspects of Tom into a single sentence without straining the language or the reader significantly.

One of the better aspects of English is its flexibility. This enables one to translate foreign languages into it while conveying a considerably better sense of the original flavour. It makes it easier to write poetry, songs and maintain cadence and meter.

I’m entirely comfortable with the adjective preceding the noun, but in English it absolutely isn’t restrictive. One can circumvent it thus:

“I admired his shirt, silk with a fly front and ornate pattern, while sipping my sherry.”

or

“I admired his suit of worsted wool, pin striped and double breasted.”

This flexibility is wonderful, but it does make English a very difficult language to master, particularly for people where English is not their first language.

I consider languages which restrict the writer / speaker for no good purpose to be poorly developed / evolved and illogical.

1. The first requirement of language is that it should permit and facilitate clear precise and concise communication without unnecessary complexity.

2. The second is that flexibility should be restricted as little as possible commensurate with the first goal.

Unfortunately, this being English, it isn’t that simple either. This item is already long enough for a single post to The Blog, but tomorrow we’ll look at a problem where the English grammatical structure for qualifying nouns with adjectives breaks down around the tricky issue of negatives. We’ll look at another grammatical failing at the same time.