Have you ever wondered why many foreign speakers of English, as fluent as they may be, never entirely master the language? I can think of the Dutch. Many Dutch people speak English well, but there are few that speak it really well, like a native-speaker – unless they spent some time growing up in a English-speaking country. I exclude those. Mark Forsyth’s fascinating piece on BBC online explains why.
The language rules we know but don’t know we know
Over the weekend, I happened to go viral. Or rather a single paragraph from a book I wrote called The Elements of Eloquence went viral. The guilty paragraph went like this:
“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.” Read on…