Re: more on adjectives

I also find > He is a stupid, old, black and white hunting dog. to be the
only "right" order of adjectives - but why?

I am a sometimes teacher of English to immigrants. I was recently reflecting
on the order of adjectives in English and what rules I might offer for the
correct order. Clearly there are rules, but they are complex and fraught
with exceptions. When I offer rules like this to my learners, typically they
first roll thier eyes and sigh and second begin to subvocalize "f**k that
s**t" in their native tongues. Nonetheless most of them use mostly the
correct order intuitively. Generally when they do err it is due to
interference from a different order in their native tongues. I am impressed,
though that often they will use the correct English order even in
contradistinction to their first language's order. This makes me think that
the mechanisms of adjectiveal precedence are housed in the same distant and
submerged place as Chomski's deep structure.

With this in mind, I began paying attention to the order of adjectives in my
conlang, although I had never given that problem a second's thought in all
of the nearly 45 years that I have been playing with this language. Sure
enough there are some orderings that are correct, some that are manifestly
incorrect, and some that, while not "wrong", just don't sound right and
would never be used by a native speaker - or would only be used in a nonce
fashion to achieve a certain effect.

I would like to know more about the ordering of adjectives. I'm sure that
there must be something like one for language in general and languages in
particular, but trying to unravel slippery and amorphous systems like that
gives me a headache.