When I studied Español all those years (decades) ago, I can remember being intrigued by the fact that adjectives often followed nouns, rather than preceding them.  I guess I had actually been exposed to the phenomenon before then.  The song “Una Paloma Blanca”, for example, was popular when I was a boy, and it had not escaped me that it was literally “a dove white”, rather than “a white dove”.  I really hadn’t thought about it much, though, until I began the community college Spanish experience in Fall, 1985.

Seeds of Curiosity

Recently, I was working with Lupita at one of our job sites when I began calling her my pequeña hermana.  But then I remember wondering whether it was supposed to be “pequeña hermana” or “hermana pequeña”.

I pondered that for a while until finally remembering to DuckDuck it (since I never Google) and found the page “Adjectives: Part II” on StudySpanish.com, where I learned that article adjectives and adjectives of quantity precede nouns, whereas descriptive adjectives succeed them.  Simple, right?  But what if I have a list of adjectives? 

Curiosity Blooming

For example, I don’t just want to refer to Lupita as my little sister.  What if I want to call her my sweet little sister?  (I can’t see her right now, but I’m pretty sure she’s either blushing or, maybe, rolling her eyes about this.)  How does that combining of adjectives work?  How do I “stack” the adjectives, so to speak.  In English, of course, it would depend on what the adjective modifies.  It’s almost mathematical, in a sense.  (Bear with me here.)  If we’re using 2 adjectives to modify the same noun, the effect is, in effect additive, and a comma is used.  Thus, if we were wanting “sweet” and “little” to modify “sister”, it would, in effect, be…

(“sweet” + “little”) × “sister”

…and would be expressed “sweet, little sister”.

However, what if we want “sweet” to modify the entire phrase “little sister”?  (By this time, my sweet little sister, I can assure you, is about to call me a nerd.)  In this case, it would be multiplicative (mathematically).  In effect…

“sweet” × (“little” × “sister”)

…expressed simply “sweet little sister”.

Okay, enough of that.  (Yes, Lupita, I am a nerd.  But I liked it better back when you called me smarty-pants.)  What I’m wondering, and intend to determine, even if I have to search “to the end of the Internet”, is how I am to go about combining adjectives in each of these cases.

On SpanishDict, I entered the phrase “sweet, tiny sister” and got some mixed results:

• “hermana pequeña, dulce”
• “pequeña, dulce hermana”
• “hermana dulce y pequeña”

Incidentally, using “dulce little sister” yielded “hermanita dulce”, which solves my problem in this case, but does nothing to sate my curiosity about the matter.

Next Steps?

I’m going to continue to research this and revisit it in a future post.  I’m thinking of looking ahead a few lessons in my Rocket Spanish course to see whether I can find some guidance.

Mientras tanto, si mi hermanita dulce wants to step in and offer any advice to this Gringo Grande, of course, I’ll happily accept that, too.  I just hope she doesn’t call me a nerd in front of all my friends.  (Or, if she does, that she’ll do so en Español.)

¡Hasta luego!