I have noticed that in English we put the colour before the object.
For instance we, would say White House but in Spanish it would be
Casa Blanca (House White) or in French they would say for instance
Mont Blanc (Mountain White) or eau rouge (water red) and not the
way we do it with the colour first. Same in Italian, as they would say
Torro Rosso instead of what it is in English which is Red Bull.
So how come English doesn't do it the way French, Spanish, and Italian
do with the object before the colour? Why does English do colour first
then the object?
Best Answer
This isn't specific to colour. In English the vast majority of attributive adjectives precede the nouns they modify. In French the great majority come after the nouns, although there are quite a few common exceptions.
English is a Germanic language, like German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. French is a Romance language, like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.
In Germanic languages, descriptive adjectives "appear predominantly to the left of the head noun" (Harbert, The Germanic Languages, Cambridge University Press, p127). Additionally, across the Germanic languages, adjectives tend to appear in a "more or less constant" relative order (e.g. colour adjectives appear closer to the noun than quantity adjectives, and adjectives describing permanent qualities occur closer than those describing temporary qualities). In early medieval times, though, the N-Adj order was "not infrequent" in at least some of the Germanic languages, although it may be that these postnominal adjectives should be interpreted as appositive or quasi-predicative "rather than postposed modifying adjectives" (ibid., pp127-9).
Posner (The Romance Languages, Cambridge University Press) points out that that according to studies of language typology, SVO languages tend to put the adjectives after the nouns they modify, whereas SOV languages put the adjectives before the nouns (as Germanic languages do despite being largely SVO). Latin was predominantly SOV (although SVO, OVS etc were also used for emphasis), whereas Romance languages are predominantly SVO. This would lead to a prediction that Latin ought to favour pre-posed adjectives and Romance postposed ones. In fact the Latin pattern is more complicated. Romance is somewhat complicated too, as although adjectives are mostly postposed, some adjectives are always pre-posed, and the amount of pre-position tends to be greater in elevated and literary language than in popular language (Posner, p146).