There are a lot of established terms composed of two formally equal components, and where the sequence is, by convention, immutable:
“Northeast” not “Eastnorth” for the 45° compass direction
“Laurel and Hardy” not “Hardy and Laurel” for the comedy act
“Assault and battery” not “Battery and assault” for the criminal offence.
Of course the first variant looks more natural to us now, if only because of its familiarity.
But has linguistics come up with rules which can predict, for a new pairing of two terms, which sequence is more likely to be adopted into conventional language (absent a speaker’s semantic bias on which of the two terms is more important)?
Korean uses 동북 (East-North), not 북동 (North-East) for that direction. I’m not a Chinese speaker, but I have seen the word written in characters and the word is the same usage as in Korean.
Your three examples already evoke a variety of processes. “North” and “south” are in some sense more “fundamental” than “east” and “west”, being along the Earth’s axis of spin. The order or names for two-name entertainment acts are generally decided upon by the two entertainers (and/or their agent) early in their career, the first name often being of the artist seen at the time as more “dominant” (Paul Simon, even John Lennon as a songwriter…), though euphony plays a part.
Your third example is from the many doubled legal phrases, rooted in the Norman French/Late Middle English blend in British legal contexts after 1066. While the example you give seems to have two French-derived words, most others have one of each. Not sure which, if any, tends to go first.
Interesting. East and west could be seen as more “fundamental,” too, being the direction of sunrise and sunset. So, we haven’t really yet answered the question for direction terms.
It occurs to me that one general rule (though often broken) is that the shorter word goes first (i.e., the one with fewer syllables) – though that doesn’t help us when they are the same syllabic length, as in the examples of the OP.
Not quite the same issue, but a very closely related one, I think: there are rules, of a sort, about adjective order in English. The “rules” are loose, complex, and exception riddled, but, nevertheless, there is some consistency in the way English speakers order adjectives, and it sound not exactly incorrect, but a bit “off” if they are not followed.
As for A & B versus B & A order, if there are rules of a similar type to the adjective order ones, it will surely not be very surprising if they are completely different in different languages, or even if some languages have such rules, and others do not (although the linked article does suggest that, to some extent, the adjective rules may be universal across most, or many, languages).
Whichever one flows best in the language. When a binary concept first arises, users of it will gravitate toward calling it whichever option rolls off the tongue nicely: Law and order, Peanut butter and jelly, Click and Clack, Mumbo-jumbo. If one coins a phrase, it is not likely to become a platitude unless people enjoy saying it. No doubt Ben and Jerry’s can attribute at least some of its corporate success to the fact that they didn’t make anybody say Jerry and Ben;'s, and no doubt the two gentlemen discussed that fact before drawing up their DBA papers.
True, but I think the OP is hoping there might be some linguistic rules (loosely applied) which *predict *what will “roll off the tongue nicely.”
From your list, for example, I notice (besides the 2-to-1 preference for “shorter word first,” where applicable) that the word with a tenser vowel tends to come first. I’m not sure if “tense” is the right word – I mean the vowel that requires a smaller, tighter mouth position, like “i” in “click” (compared to “a” in “clack”), “ea” in “peanut” (vs. “e” in “jelly”), etc. That is, we prefer to start out tense, and then relax and broaden the mouth as we proceed through the phrase.
Maybe, or maybe not. I await a cite of real data, or a cite of a linguist who already discovered this, to confirm or refute this initial observation of mine.
Right–that’s what’s usually referred to as euphony.
The OP’s question speaks to the very essence of idiomaticity, and I don’t think anyone has come up with any “laws” about it, but rather more and more recent studies (such as this), drawing upon large amounts of corpus data, conclude that such pairings (in as much as they are the most prevalent kind of idiom), apart from euphony, result from historical circumstance and usage more than anything.
People have a natural sense of the rhythm of their native language. It’s called “cadence.” Listen to a 10-month-old babble. By that age, they may not have any words yet, but they usually know the cadence of their native language, and their babbling sounds language-like.
English tends toward iamb-dactyl, although there is a preference for trochees at the end of phrases. “Laurel and Hardy” is dactyl-trochee. “Northwest” is iambic. “Simon and Garfunkel” is dactyl-dactyl." “Garfunkel Simon” would be dactyl-trochee, but “Garfunkel and Simon” would be dactyl-trochee-clunk. There’s an extra syllable that sounds wrong in English. People would end up mispronouncing “Garfunkel” as “GarFUNkel,” so “Garfunkel and Simon” would be iamb-iamb-trochee.
“Assault and battery” is iamb-iamb-iamb. “Battery and assault” is trochee-iamb-iamb. It’s also not alphabetical. The latter may be just as important in that case. “Law and Order” is trochee-trochee, which is sing-songy, and probably would annoy if it went on for another couple of syllables, but for just four, isn’t two bad-- it seems nice and neat. “Order and law” is trochee-iamb. Again, it makes you want to misplace the stress. With “Law and Order,” it’s very easy to stress Law & the first syllable or Order. With “Order and Law,” “Law” gets stressed over “Order.”
Now, I’m not saying that people sit down and think about “iamb” and “trochee,” but the human brain is amazing at processing language, and can actually run through a couple of choices of phase before spitting out the best one, in a natural conversation (eavesdrop sometimes-- natural conversation is not as smooth as rehearsed dialogue, but it’s still amazingly rapid).
No matter what the linguistic analysis of the phrase, the real reason why it’s “Simon and Garfunkel” instead of the reverse is because Simon was the songwriter. For any performing group of that nature, the choice is made due to factors other than euphony.
In general, for instance, composing teams are “songwriter and lyricist” (especially with Broadway composing teams). In cases where both names are songwriters, then it’s chosen so that top billing goes to the leader of the group at the time (“Lennon and McCartney”) or for other arbitrary reasons (“Adler and Ross” has them listed alphabetically).
For comedy teams, the bigger talent is usually listed first (“Laurel and Hardy” – Stan created the jokes, Oliver just showed up and performed them). There are other exceptions, but euphony is a secondary consideration to other factors.
I’m not disagreeing, but “Garfunkel and Simon” would have been more difficult. First, everyone would have pronounced Garfunkel wrong to try to improve the cadence, and then after being corrected, would have ended up saying it with a pause after Garfunkel, as though there were a comma there (dactyl-iamb-trochee), or smashing it together so it came out "Garfunkl’n Simon (dactyl-trochee).
Kander and Ebb always comes out “Kandernd (pause) Ebb.” “Kander and Ebb” is trochee-iamb. “Kandernd (beat) Ebb” is dactyl-iamb. People will enunciate it correctly when introducing them, but in conversation, in always gets reduced. And sometimes you hear a story about an announcer who infamously couldn’t get a name right. Usually there was something odd about the syllabification that tripped them up.
I was on a jury, and the defendant had a Nigerian name-- his last name was A-dee-dir-RAN. People said it about five different ways (including his own lawyer), and none of them were right. People would either add an extra syllable, or stress the third syllable instead of the last. Poor guy.
Just one point. Assault precedes the battery and, while it is possible to have assault alone (just cock a fist at someone), it is not possible to have battery alone. So there is a logic to that one. As for the others, I think euphony in one form or another is the general principle.
Interesting to note: in mathematics, names are (virtually) always alphabetical. In other fields they are generally not and there is a lot of jockeying over the order of names on papers.
Actually, for comedy teams the standard convention is that the straight man goes first: Burns & Allen, Martin & Lewis, Abbott & Costello, Rowan & Martin, et al. There are exceptions (Burns & Schreiber, although I was never sure who was supposed to be the actual straight man.)
Similarly with peanut butter and jelly – you learn pretty young that you need to put the peanut butter on the bread first, then the jelly. It’s really messy to try to spread peanut butter on top of jelly.
Yes, it seems that syllable stress does play some part, in that dactyls (or the item with multiple-final unstressed syllables) tend to take the second position. (Goods and services, ladies and gentlemen, peace and harmony, etc.) But there are indeed binomial collocations of “dactyl-trochee-clunk” that don’t “sound wrong” (e.g., rules and regulations). “Garfunkle and Simon” sounds “wrong” (and might not be the best example) simply because Simon and Garfunkel, through usage, has become a single lexical item ( i.e., Garfunkel and Simon is thereby semantically distinct, referring to the individuals in that order, rather than the performing duo). The reverse collocation in and of itself does not seem to violate any kind of rule. It is through usage that these things come to “sound wrong.” Likewise, there is no “prohibition” against a trochee-iamb collocation, as in order and law, because we do in fact have examples of that, too, such as bubbles and squeak. With regard to the OP, I think we might want to distinguish between aesthetics and the language that people actually speak.
I have my doubts that we can, as the OP is wondering, come up with a “law” to predict how future binomials will initially collocate. But, in fact, just last month a book was published about the OP’s topic (The (Ir)reversibility of English Binomials – Sandra Mollin), which addresses the OP’s apparent assumption that all binomials are “by convention, immutable.” In fact, they aren’t, as the corpus data demonstrate; many reverse by varying degrees for varying reasons. I haven’t read it yet, so I couldn’t say whether it does or does not attempt to identify the reasons for how or “why” the preferred collocations arise in the beginning.
