Which is most correct to you?
Follow up poll, which of these is most correct to you?
language/brain nerd stuff
The most common order in each case is exactly what I expected, but I did expect deeper biases toward the most common word orders.
Admittedly this is small number of people, and this poll is hardly science, but changing "round" to "circular" seems to switch the natural sounding word order of shape and colour for most people
language/brain nerd stuff
I suspect it might be because ordering adjectives by specificity makes for efficient thinking and communication, which is somewhat subjective. Hence adjective order would be an emergent, flexible convention observable across languages and cultures, rather than inviolable rule. Which is the case.
Languages that put noun before adjectives tend to show this same ordering, but inverted. Seems like the noun is the most specific thing and grounds the other characteristics?
language/brain nerd stuff
So in this case, "circular" is a more specific term than "round", and if I'm right that would be what causes most people to switch shape and colour ordering.
This paper goes much deeper:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-041835
Excellent answer from Daniel Ross here: https://www.quora.com/What-order-of-adjectives-do-languages-other-than-English-have-Are-there-general-trends-in-those?share=1
