Re: OT: Merry Christmas!

> >(Incidentally, I don't know French, but I have noticed a bit that
> >adjectives sometimes come before the noun, and sometimes after. Are
> >there rules for when, or are adjective-before just fixed phrases or
> >something?)
>
>"grand petit haut gros, ??? joli beau, mauvais digne vilain sot, premier
>dernier et nombreux" are the adjectives that precede a noun we learnt at
>school. But instinctively, there must be many others, mostly the ones
>that
>have only one or two syllables AFAIK. But better ask a Frenchman about
>that.
I didn't know the rule for it because it is intuitive for a frensh native
speaker but I looked in my grammar book

it is said that an adjective that indicates the color or the form is placed
after the noun

Les nuages noirs (the black clouds)
Une boîte ronde (a round box)

(but in poems or litterature it is very current that one inverses these:
"les noirs nuages" sounds more poetic than "les nuages noirs)

also an adjective with a complement will go after the noun

and, generally, an adjective that is more long than the noun will go after
it and a smaller one will go before it.

But sometimes an adjective can change its sense by being before or after the
noun it refers to

Un dîner maigre: a direr without meat
Un maigre dîner: a not very abundant diner