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Some owls have skinny long legs (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lemmylem@lemm.ee to c/todayilearned@lemmy.ml

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[–] MasterNerd@lemm.ee 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You know seeing how you phrased the sentence, I know intuitively that it should be long, skinny legs instead of skinny long legs but I'm not sure why

[–] Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

There's actually a "proper" order of adjectives in English!

https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2021/0921/Explaining-the-royal-order-of-adjective-placement

It's not something ever learn directly, but nonetheless we all seem to inherently know it. Why this order? Who knows! It's one of many weird quirks of our language (and some others). It's certainly a hard thing for non-native speakers to pick up on.

[–] nul@programming.dev 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I honestly wouldn't blame anyone who just rage quits English upon getting to this lesson in ESL class.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 7 months ago

english isn't special all languages have this

how do you think anglophones feel when they learn french and have to say "small balloon red"?