Re: The Birds and the Bees of Gender

Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...> wrote:

>    Date:         Tue, 30 Mar 1999 12:08:56 -0500
>    From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
>
>    Fascinating!  I'd never even THOUGHT of that as a problem.  But now that
>    I think about it, your absolutely right, why isn't "lettuce" and "rice"
>    countable?  ESPECIALLY lettuce, since it's so large, you can easily have
>    "one lettuce".
>
> Cattle. Furniture.
Yeah, I thought the same. If size were an issue, there would
be a hint for L2 learners to know. English is quite rigid on
that, while much less rigid on other issues such as transitivity
of verbs (I broke the window, the window broke, etc.)
Spanish, while very rigid on the latter, is not so on the former.
_Ganado_ "cattle" is uncountable, but _mueble_ "piece of furniture"
is countable (and it's difficult for me to remember "furniture"
is uncountable), and most other nouns are both, particularly
liquids like wine, coffee, and even water (if you say _un agua_
*"a water" in certain contexts, it can be interpreted as "a bottle
of [mineral] water"). And of course there's "news", a very strange
thing about English (and terribly difficult to explain to Spanish
speakers -- trust me on this, I had pupils.)


--Pablo Flores

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 The trouble with the rat race is that even
 if you win,  you're still a rat.
                                             Lily Tomlin