Why do we place adjectives in a certain order?

[Kaleva]

It sounds normal to say "The big, blue sky." but "The blue, big sky." doesn't.

"The faint, red mark on her forehead." instead of "The red, faint mark on her forehead.".

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. There is a specific order of adjectives that we all follow without knowing why.

The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary

[Glorfindel]

5. opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose

"The hideous, towering, ancient, rugose, purplish, extraterrestrial, murdering monster rose high above his writhing victims." Sounds positively Lovecraftian, doesn't it?

[Kaleva]

7. I don't recall ever being taught that in school but listening to others ingrains it into us.

[dhol82]

2. Because they are being used as modifiers.

I am not a grammarian and can be proved wrong.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. But there's specific order when you use multiple adjectives. See #1.

[dhol82]

4. Saw that. Wonderful answer.

Thank you.
Now I can trot it out when presented with this question.

[Sophia4]

6. There are situations in which "the blue, big sky" works well.

Depends on the effect you want to make with your words.

It may be a rule, but it is more of a convention. Breaking grammar rules can be useful in writing and speaking if you know what you are doing.

Poetry for example.

Slogans for example.

Sometimes you don't want your sentence to sound "natural" or like someone else's sentence.

So it's a rule but on occasion made to be broken.

[sl8]

8. The language rules we know but don't know we know

From http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

The language rules we know but don't know we know

By Mark Forsyth
8 September 2016

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.”


BBC Culture’s editor Matthew Anderson tweeted a passage from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence and it went viral (Credit: Matthew Anderson)

English speakers love to learn this sort of thing for two reasons. First, it astonishes us that there are rules that we didn’t know that we knew. That’s rather peculiar, and rather exciting. We’re all quite a lot cleverer than we think we are. And there’s the shock of realising that there’s a reason there may be little green men on Mars, but there certainly aren’t green little men. Second, you can spend the next hour of your life trying to think of exceptions, which is useful as it keeps you from doing something foolish like working.

Actually, there are a couple of small exceptions. Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of linguistics. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What happened to the rules?

...

More at link.

[Iggo]

9. "The train leaves tomorrow."

I didn't know that I knew!

[Kaleva]

10. Does the rule about the order of adjectives apply to all or most languages?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

11. It apparently applies to some extent in Norwegian:

The order of adjectives is the same as in English but note that what you have listed as Material and Qualifier is expressed through compounding in Norwegian in most cases. Also note that the proposed order is not completely rigid for some of the categories:

1a) en liten, ny bil
1b) en ny, liten bil
2a) en ny, fransk bil
*2b) en fransk, ny bil

I can accept both 1a) and 1b) as grammatical, but 2b) sounds weird. I would always separate adjectives with a comma (or with og, depending on the context).

These examples would translate as a little, new car; a new, little car; a new, French car; and a French, new car. It is suggested here that the last example, "a French, new car," doesn't sound right.

I'm not sure about German. Both of these languages, unlike English, alter adjective endings to go with the nouns they modify, which complicates the issue a bit.