Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

Nik Taylor scripsit:

> Actually, in my opinion, it's *corn* that has little logic.  Corn seems
> to me to be more logically a count noun than a mass noun, yet English
> considers it mass.
"Corn" originally, and in the U.K. still, refers to whatever the staple
grain is: it means wheat in England and oats in Scotland, for example.
The English settlers in the New World found the natives eating maize
as their staple grain, and called it "Indian corn", eventually shortened
to just "corn".  Both wheat and oats fit the general model of a mass
noun much better than maize does, but the massness of "corn" is
grammaticalized and independent of the semantics, just as "book" in
Japanese still uses the "long thin" classifier even though Japanese
books are now normally codices rather than scrolls.

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