Re: The Birds and the Bees of Gender

Douglas Koller wrote:
> The greater bugaboo, I think, is the seemingly arbitrary
> distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. Liquids are
> uncountable? Okay. But "rice" is uncountable while "peas" (at least in
> modern usage) are countable. "Lettuce"
[snip]
> Chinese-English and Japanese-English
> dictionaries mark every noun entry as either "C" or "U"
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".

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