When a noun is modified by another noun and two adjectives, what is the correct order?
For example: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Shouldn’t it be Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles since they are mutant turtles not mutant ninjas?
Below is the long explanation for why I began pondering this.
I have been watching Mad Men and have numerous questions about the show, the 60’s, etc.
Season 4 Ep 3 Don and Lane go to a movie. At first I thought it was Godzilla; however upon closer inspection it was a giant turtle. I could not find any site naming the movie only that it was a “Godzilla type.” I did find a movie “Gammera the Invincible”; however it was released in the US in 66 not 65 when episode takes place.
This made me think about the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” which I can honestly say I have never thought about before.
This particular example is a bad one because it is idiomatic and idioms don’t have to make grammatical sense.
If you still want to break it down, try this:
They are Turtles. What kind of turtles are they? Ninja Turtles. Are they any variety of Ninja Turtles? Yes, Mutant Ninja Turtles. BTW, How old are they? They are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Could I make the same argument for Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles? Or Mutant Ninja Teenage Turtles? Sure. You can pile up adjectives in English if they are all modifying the same noun. There is no correct order unless one of the variants produces confusion.
Here’s a blurb on the order of adjectives in English. I don’t take this to mean “this is the only way,” but I think in general it’s an order that appeals to our hearing.
Then that modifying ‘noun’ has, in effect, become an adjective. E.g., in the phrase ‘train station’, ‘train’ is an adjective. Which station? The train station.
In English, we don’t always ‘conjugate’ words of one part of speech when converting them to another part of speech with a proper suffix or specialized form. So, it’s not ‘trainal station’ nor ‘Ninjal Turtles.’
A noun that functions as an adjective to modify another noun is a standard feature in English. It is called a noun adjunct. Some other languages, like Spanish, don’t allow this. Thus, in English you could go to a restaurant and order a “Chicken Burrito”, but in Spanish, you must order a “Burrito de Pollo”. The English version, being somewhat more word-efficient, is increasingly popular in “Spanglish”. Thus, you could order a “Pollo Burrito”.
I work with cash register software. There is a data entry form for configuration and user preferences, which we called the “Register Setup Data Entry Form”. At the end of the last page of the multi-page form was the phrase “End of Register Setup Data Entry Form”.
We had a Spanish version, translated by an in-house employee who apparently spoke reasonably fluent Spanish (although his native tongue was Brazilian Portuguese). At the end of the form, he wrote: “Fin de forma de entrada de datos de setup del registro” (I don’t recall if he used some Spanish word for “setup”.)
The adjunct noun construct leads to ambiguities. For example, consider “Large furniture warehouse”. Is this a large warehouse for furniture? Or is it a warehouse for large furniture?
Every time I pass a house with a sign saying “Big Garage Sale!!!” I always wonder: How big are the garages they are selling?
A certain friend of mine argued once that ambiguities like these cannot happen in Spanish because, in Spanish, adjectives come after the noun instead of before it. That’s wrong. The Spanish word order has nothing to do with it. The reason you don’t get ambiguities like this is because Spanish doesn’t use adjunct nouns.
I’m not really sure I would consider “train station” to be adjective-noun instead of a compound noun. You cannot separate train from station with (other) adjectives. You would not say “train old station” even if you wanted to emphasize that it was the station, not the train that was old.
On the other hand, all three words modifying “turtles” in the OP are pure adjectives. They aren’t even adjunct nouns, despite having evolved from them. Why? Because you can insert another adjective, or, in this case, switch them around.
Well thats just a name. THe set of ninja turtles seems to be the same as the set of mutant turtles, that set being the same as the set of teenage mutant ninja turtles. (but not the same as the set of teenage turtles, depending on what that word means !)
That they are nouns is irrelevant, we use nouns as adjectives to describe the set they belong to.
A better example,
red fire truck.
vs
fire red truck.
Well they are the same set.
Whould should one be before the other ?
They are names of sets.
But there doesnt have to be a ancestory described in the naming for trucks.
So eg for animals
short nose southern turtle
This means there is a set of southern tutles and then a subset of that,
short nosed ones.
You cannot assume that
“southern shortnosed turtles” makes sense, and refers to the same set.
indeed there may be
short nosed turtles , elsewhere, eg in china, a different species.
But how did mutant ninja turtles descend ? Presumably they have got it wrong, the ninja ones are a subset of the mutant turtles.
*In grammar, a noun adjunct or **attributive noun **or **noun premodifier **is an optional noun that modifies another noun, meaning that it can be removed without changing the grammar of the sentence; it is a noun functioning as an adjective.*It’s an adjective formed from a noun without modifying it to make it look like an adjective. But, it’s an adjective in function.
Of course, you can always take out the space and make it a compound word noun, as in ‘bookkeeper.’ The only thing that stops one from doing so is convention.
This type of ambiguity is properly resolved with hyphenation in the modifier, such as “large-furniture warehouse” if it’s a warehouse for large furniture. If the hyphenation isn’t there we should assume it’s a furniture warehouse which is large.
