French prenominal adjectives

[Echobeats]

Is there any logic to which French adjectives appear before the noun and which after? I was probably taught it in school at some point, but I can't remember. If there is some kind of rule I thought it might be worth putting something similar in a conlang.

Thanks.

[Wattmann]

e: My horrible bad
Sorry

[merijn]

When I was in high school, I was told that it was a lexical property, and we had to learn by heart the small number of adjectives that were prenominal, but I forgot which they were. I have also read that in some Romance languages (perhaps not France), all so called non-intersective adjectives are prenominal. Roughly, non-intersective adjectives are adjectives where in the construction "adjective noun" you cannot change it in "noun that is adjective". For instance with the non-intersective "former" you cannot say for "the former president" "the president who is former". Some adjectives can be both "an old friend" is intersective if you mean a friend who is 93, but non-intersective if you are talking about a friend you met years ago.

[Ser]

Intersective adjectives can perfectly go before too though, but I'm not sure about what are the exact semantic effects exactly. (In Spanish at least, I think it gives it some marking of grandeur, poetic-ness or sarcasm.)

[Terra]

What I learned/remember it as, is that adjectives describing beauty, age, goodness, and size (BAGS) go before the noun that they modify.
- La belle femme ...
- Le vieux homme ...
- Le bon chat ...
- Le grand chien ...

[Gulliver]

No, I don't think there's logic behind it. They are largely short, common words denoting fairly basic concepts (small, big, good, bad, young, old). If it's a slightly uncommon or longer word, or a colour, it probably goes afterwards.

Some adjectives have a different meaning depending on whether they appear before or after the noun. Ancien means former after the noun, but ancient before it. Cher is similar, meaning dear (ie precious) before and expensive after. There are some (possibly) compound nouns that look like adj+noun that change their meaning a little when the order is swapped. Un jeune homme is a young man but un homme jeune is a youngish man.

I think Spanish and Portuguese have similar examples, so it's probably an old enough linguistic feature to have shaken off any once-logical pattern and be one of the "no, you just have to memorise them" group.

This is actually one of my favourite little language quirks.

[Echobeats]

No, I don't think there's logic behind it. They are largely short, common words denoting fairly basic concepts (small, big, good, bad, young, old). If it's a slightly uncommon or longer word, or a colour, it probably goes afterwards.

Yes: it's tantalising close to being logical!

Some adjectives have a different meaning depending on whether they appear before or after the noun. Ancien means former after the noun, but ancient before it.

Isn't it the other way round? As in ancien régime? (Cf. merijn's comment about "non-intersective" adjectives.)

This is actually one of my favourite little language quirks.

It is a fun one, which is why I thought it might be good conlang material. Something like having SV order generally but VS for a small number of verbs.

[Gulliver]

Some adjectives have a different meaning depending on whether they appear before or after the noun. Ancien means former after the noun, but ancient before it.

Isn't it the other way round? As in ancien régime? (Cf. merijn's comment about "non-intersective" adjectives.)

Erk. Yes. I managed to write the opposite of what I meant. Clever, that.

[Yng]

What I learned/remember it as, is that adjectives describing beauty, age, goodness, and size (BAGS) go before the noun that they modify.
- La belle femme ...
- Le vieux homme ...
- Le bon chat ...
- Le grand chien ...

Except then you have la femme sensationnelle, l'homme âgé, le chat génial and le chien miniscule. In fact, those four are basically the only four adjectives within those semantic groups (along with their opposites) that are part of this phenomenon, and there are other adjectives which don't really fit (autre, ancien meaning 'former', etc). BAGS is not really that useful.

[Ars Lande]

Some rough guidelines:

Adjectives of more than three syllables are placed after the noun.
Participles are placed after the noun as well.
So are:
Nationalities, colours, taste, some adjectives qualifying appearance.
Adjectives further completed by an infinitive: facile à lire, difficile à voir.
Adjectives preceded by an adverb in -ment: Une très belle femme - Une femme vraiment belle

Monosyllabic adjectives tend to be placed before the noun.
Adjectives may also be placed before the noun if the resulting noun phrase has been lexicalized as a fixed expression: grand homme, jeunes mariés. , nouvel an
Ordinals are placed before the noun.

Finally, there are adjectives that either go before or after the noun. The difference is purely lexical, and I'm afraid you'll have nothing to do but to learn those.

(There are also, I'm sure plenty of exceptions to the rules above. )

[Ser]

Some adjectives have a different meaning depending on whether they appear before or after the noun. Ancien means former after the noun, but ancient before it.

Isn't it the other way round? As in ancien régime? (Cf. merijn's comment about "non-intersective" adjectives.)

Erk. Yes. I managed to write the opposite of what I meant. Clever, that.

Not quite: you say ancien français, but espagnol/anglais ancien. There's also the issue of collocations.

Adjectives of more than three syllables are placed after the noun.
Participles are placed after the noun as well.
So are:
Nationalities, colours, taste, some adjectives qualifying appearance.
[...]
Adjectives preceded by an adverb in -ment: Une très belle femme - Une femme vraiment belle

But as I said above, this is just a tendency and not a strict thing, specially for grandeur(~exageration?)/poetry/sarcasm.

Microsoft envoie un minuscule gâteau aux développeurs de Firefox pour les taquiner sur les nouveaux cycles de développement de Mozilla

(Source)

Cernés par trois divisions de l'armée, les Tigres se retrouvent désormais piégés dans une zone minuscule, sans accès à la mer et sans possibilité de fuir.

(Source)

L'heure n'est pas aux projets, regrets passés, oubliés rêves et délires

(Source)

« Il avait les cheveux noirs et des piercings sur le côté gauche du visage. Il portait des jeans et de très beaux vêtements noirs. Il était vraiment bel homme », décrit-elle, encore sous le choc.

(Source)

(For anybody interested, I could perfectly render the above with that word order in Spanish too.)

Adjectives further completed by an infinitive: facile à lire, difficile à voir.

I wonder if this is truly strict though. I don't think putting it before would be wholly grammatical in Spanish, or at all, and I'm having a hard time finding examples with Google that don't look like automatic translations from English. (Does anybody know a French corpus usable for this?)

[Ars Lande]

Adjectives further completed by an infinitive: facile à lire, difficile à voir.

I wonder if this is truly strict though. I don't think putting it before would be wholly grammatical in Spanish, or at all, and I'm having a hard time finding examples with Google that don't look like automatic translations from English. (Does anybody know a French corpus usable for this?)

No idea, but you could probably try any of the French litterature available online. (Though it won't be very useful for judging current usage).
Perhaps I'm overlooking one or several important exceptions, but I can't think of any example that would sound grammatical.

I agree with you, entirely, on the idea that there are few hard and fast rules.
On your examples, though:

Microsoft envoie un minuscule gâteau aux développeurs de Firefox pour les taquiner sur les nouveaux cycles de développement de Mozilla

Minuscule, actually, isn't covered by the rules above (it doesn't fit in any of the categories, and it's exactly three syllables long). Minuscule can, indeed, be placed before or after the noun. There isn't really a semantic difference in that particular case, except emphasizing the adjective. (And I'm not too sure of that, either).

L'heure n'est pas aux projets, regrets passés, oubliés rêves et délires

Song lyrics and poetry have much looser constraints on word order. In that case, though, I wonder if oubliés rêves et délires isn't actually ellipsis: (Ils sont oubliés), (les) rêves et délires. Myself, I'd have put a comma between oubliés and rêves.

« Il avait les cheveux noirs et des piercings sur le côté gauche du visage. Il portait des jeans et de très beaux vêtements noirs. Il était vraiment bel homme », décrit-elle, encore sous le choc.

vraiment here qualifies était , not bel. Bel homme is a fixed expression, which in that sentence seems to be even treated as an adjective (otherwise, you'd have an article there).

[xxx]

adjectives can be before or after, before they can have a subjective meaning: un minuscule gateau (I expect a bigger) vs un gateau minuscule (it is objectively small);
or modify the meaning of the noun. un grand homme ( a great man =big humanity); un homme grand (a tall man=physically/objectively big)

[el imiradu]

I have read that in Old Latin all adjectives came before nouns. This gradually changed as time went on, but some of the most common adjectives have retained their old position (as more frequent words have a tendency to resist changes).