“Blue Small Shirts”
All lessons, tools and premium features (and there’s a LOT of them :).
Already a member?
This article belongs to the following series:
Audio SpeedAdjust the playback speed for audio examples -- still sounds fine down to about 70%.
Dark Mode Switch between light and dark mode -- your choice is remembered for future visits.
Still a work in progress, so let me know if you spot a glitch.
The full power of my site for 72 hours.
All lessons and all tools, no credit card needed because I'm not a shark.
Sie hat blonde(,) kurze(,) lockige Haare.
Sie hat kurze(,) blonde(,) lockige Haare.
Sie hat lockige(,) kurze(,) blonde Haare.
Hello! Can you help me undestand if these sentences are correct? Are commas optional? Thanks a lot in advance!
The sentences are correct and there should probably be commas, because all the qualities are “equal”.
That is a very very weird field of German grammar though, so in some other contexts, you might see two or three adjectives without a comma.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the babove
This discussion leaves out that the lack of a comma between adjectives, in written English, indicates that the first adjectives modify the last adjective in the string. Such adjectives are actually classified as adverbs.
The bright, blue car means the car is bright (perhaps a lot of lights are shining on it) and also blue. Here, bright is an adjective applying to car because of the comma. It may be that the car is bright because the particular shade of blue makes it bright but the sentence does not say that.
The bright blue car (without the comma) indicates that the car is bright blue. Here, bright is officially an adverb as it applies to the adjective blue. The result of the bright blue color may be that car is also bright but the sentence does not say that.
Needless to say English speakers don’t care about and therefore don’t draw such a distinction in conversation. If it is important in conversation, and it usually isn’t, the sentence is just reworked to make it clear.
German is more clear in that regard as the adverbs would get no adjective ending
– das strahlend blauE Fahrrad (the shining blue bike… the blue is shining)
– das strahlende blaue Fahrrad (the blue bike that also shines)
– das strahlende, blaue Fahrrad (the bike that is shining and blue)
This has been an absolutely fascinating post and sting of comments. I’m a native English speaker and had never given much thought to adjective order. My take is closer to berlingrabers: while there are (unconscious) word-order rules, there is actually is a good bit of flexibility too. The best writing will ensure clarity by (generously) using commas to separate terms, and by using hyphens to make compound modifiers (“still-warm,” “hour-old”).
Though not absolute, a good rule of thumb is to think of the adjectives cascading into one another, modifying the word (or term) that follows along to the right: the less factual and more ephemeral drift farther to the left; the more concrete, factual, and immutable slide rightward towards the noun.
So in American English there is a comma sometimes used with adjectives. Wikipedia has the easiest explanation.
Wikipedia- ‘A comma is used to separate coordinate adjectives; that is, adjectives that directly and equally modify the following noun. Adjectives are considered coordinate if the meaning would be the same if their order were reversed or if and were placed between them. For example:
The dull, incessant droning but the cute little cottage.
The devious lazy red frog suggests there are lazy red frogs (one of which is devious), while the devious, lazy red frog does not carry this connotation.’
I will say this, though, as an English degree holder, I always notice when someone doesn’t correctly use the comma.
When I came to the States to study, I first had to learn to write/communicate in American, having grown up in Germany with British English LOL
English is very strict about the order of adjectives, but I would say just about 0% of schools cover it. English speakers just kind of feel what is correct. Most people don’t find out there is an order until they watch some YouTube video titled “Why do is it Big Red Truck instead of Red Big Truck”? and wow even typing Red Big Truck hurts my brain.
Just noticed an example: I have a jar of “Griechische gemischte marinierte Oliven.” That would sound really odd in English – “Greek mixed marinated olives.” I think either “marinated mixed Greek olives” or “mixed marinated Greek olives” would be OK, but nobody would ever put “Greek” first. Does the German version sound at all odd?
I do agree with Andy above that this isn’t something to worry about so much – mixing up adjective order in English usually won’t keep you from being understood. It’s more something to work on if you really want to polish your English and work toward native-level proficiency. (And it’s certainly good to work on if you intend to write for publication.)
It does sound a bit odd, but putting Griechisch at the end would cost it almost all its focus. I think the fact that they’re from Greece is a selling point. The cluster of 3 adjective is just a bit too much to process in a marketing situation, especially with a bore like “gemischt” among them. Like… whatever. . I feel like “Griechische Oliven, gemischt und mariniert” would have actually been the better choice.
I think this makes a lot of sense because I often speak colloquially this way in English. Even if “the young beautiful man” sounds off, “I only like YOUNG beautiful men” doesn’t, because that emphasis kind of puts ‘beautiful men’ as a unit.
Adjektives use COMMAS ?? I thought that was one difference to English. Sigh.
In English if you say “blue small shirts”, you would be emphasizing that there are small shirts in the color blue: As in, “we have BLUE small shirts, but not red ones”. I had no idea we have actual rules about adjective order in English. In school we never studied this. You just know. I have fresh empathy for my German friend who cannot tell me why something is correct auf Deutsch, but only that it sounds right. Wow! Something that is more complicated in English than in German. Who knew? Because it really does sound weird in a different order.
Question: How are multiple adjectives, with and without the appropriate comma, declined when there is no deteriminer for the noun, ie der, das, die? Are they all declined to the same appropriate case, or is the first declined to der, das, die ending, and the rest declined with -e or -en?
If there are multiple adjectives, they all get the same ending. So if one gets “-en” all the others will get that, too. Here’s an example:
– Guten, teuren, alten Wein trinke ich gerne.
So it would be Sie hab ein kleines gutes Kleid an, but Sie hab das kleine gute Kleid an?
Exactly (it’s “sie hat” though)
hat, :-(, Mein Fehler.
You should not call it Advent if you are going to charge money for people to see it.
I get your point. It’s not about the cash but about having an element of surprise. I’ll probably re-tag, so the advent posts are free. However, I will say this: advent calendars in stores cost money, too. Do you complain about those as well?
Done. They’re free now.
I do not think adjective order in English is anything to worry about. You will be understood. Also, English people do change the supposedly correct adjective order when speaking and sometimes in writing, either because their speaking quickly and confusedly, or because they wish to give emphasis to certain qualities of the noun. The “old little lady”, in speech wouldn’t sound wrong in contexts in which the age of the lady is being emphasised.
Andy Murray.
Do I have to add aural emphasis to it though? Or is the switched order enough to communicate that the age is my main message.
Also, for statistic’s sake… which part of the English speaking world are you from?
You do have to verbally emphasize it just a bit. In writing you’d add a comma, because otherwise it looks odd.
English adjective order is very strict, although until very recently (having read about it in a newspaper article) I had no idea it even existed as a concept. Although all native English speakers know the rule instinctively and without thinking, I’d guess 99.9% of them have no idea a rule exists. Ask an English person (or any native speaker of English) why it’s “little old lady” and not “old little lady” and they will have no idea why – only that “old little lady” sounds terribly alien. I was astonished to learn there are 9 categories of adjective ordered as follows: Quantity, Value/opinion, Size, Temperature, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, Material.
So:
three lovely little still-warm hour-old round caramel-coloured French sponge cakes. = right
three little brown sponge French hour-old still-warm caramel-coloured round cakes = gibberish
So glad German keeps it simple!
I’ve started learning French again and it too has made me appreciate some of German’s simpler aspects – I’m talking about verb conjugation here. French has 7 past tenses for goodness sake, not to mention conditional AND subjunctive. German, I just started you seeing in a warm fuzzy light.
Yeah, somebody or other wrote a book where he points this out, and an excerpt from that has been making the rounds on the social media.
Not every bit of the order of adjectives is equally strict, if that makes sense. Like in the example above, mixing things up completely yields gibberish that you can’t really understand, but some of them could be moved around without it ceasing to be idiomatic.
– three lovely little still-warm hour-old round caramel-coloured French sponge cakes = most natural/neutral
– three lovely round little hour-old still-warm caramel-coloured French sponge cakes = fine, emphasizes shape
– three lovely still-warm hour-old little round caramel-coloured French sponge cakes = still OK to me, emphasizes condition
Obviously, there are limits. Number/quantity is definitely first. Origin and material (color too) kind of feel like they’re closest to the essence of what something is; in the example, “sponge cake” is the most basic description of what kind of cake it is, so that’s going to be fixed, just like “chocolate cake,” “buckwheat cake,” or whatever. Evaluation/opinion tends to come early because it seems like priority information, something you should know right away.
But to me, the relative placement of all that stuff in the middle is a little more flexible, especially if there’s a long string of adjectives. And some adjectives just feel better in different spots, even if they fit clearly into certain categories. “Big” and “little” just fit differently into the flow of sentences – Clifford (a children’s book/TV character) is and must always be “the big friendly dog,” not the “friendly big dog.” But “friendly little dog” sounds way better than “little friendly dog,” at least if you’re not trying to emphasize one adjective or the other.
And you might stick certain types of pairs together to “explain” the first of the pair. To me, “three lovely caramel-coloured still-warm hour-old little round French sponge cakes” works too, because the color, temperature, and age are likely the particular features that make the cakes lovely, if that makes sense.
So yeah, kudos to German for being more relaxed about these things. :)
Well, just for completion… number definitely HAS to come first in German as well. I didn’t mention it because I don’t think many people think of those as adjectives anyway. And then, country of origin does trend right. Just like countries in general nowadays…. haha.
Yeah, German has had really bad marketing over the years. I think the fact that the conjugation is so easy is a really big deal because conjugating verbs is just so important. Much more than some dumb endings on the adjective. I think textbooks and stuff should stop selling cases and gender as THE MAIN thing in German and bring it up right away as if your success depends on this. Because it doesn’t.
I couldn’t agree more!
Frequently, educators are the worst enemy of German, by emphasizing how “hard” it is, and the like, rather than simply
presenting the language as it is.
Difficulty’s relative anyhow, right?