Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

PHILIPPE CAQUANT scripsit:

> Peas: Great ! This explanation is quite satisfying. No more problems,
> no more difference between corn and peas.
The same thing happened to "cherries", where the "-s" was originally
part of the root, as you can see by comparing "cherry" with "cerise".
Nothing looks more countable than an ear of maize, but it too is labeled
by a mass noun, and we must speak of "an ear of maize" or "a kernel
of maize".

> "All nouns are mass nouns". I wonder if even the Chinese conceive
> elephants as a continuous mass ("There is elephant in the fridge"
Definitely.  (And if any culture on earth actually eats elephant, it's
probably the Chinese:  "We eat anything that moves except trains and planes.")

> It looks like we had to go and analyse furher the Chinese way
> of thinking (the grammar being very different from ours), but I know
> nothing about Chinese grammar.
It is actually not so difficult for the most part, being very like simple
English (or baby-talk, for that matter).  One of the oldest discoveries
of Chinese analytic philosophy is usually expressed in English as
"A white horse is not a horse".  This sounds paradoxical, or simply
stupid, because it has been badly translated into a count-noun language.
What it really means is "The mass called 'White-Horse' is not the same
as the mass called 'Horse'".  But in a language where these two thoughts
are normally conflated as "White horse not horse", disentangling them
counts as an important philosophical advance.

> "A water": yes, in French too, we can say "Une eau, s'il vous pla?t
> !" (although we normally have to add: "plate", or "gazeuse", or "this
> brand". "Une bi?re !" is much more common :-)
Does this get you a beer, or a question about what type of beer to get?  In
the U.S., it used to be the first, but is now changing over to the second.
In the U.K., so I understand, ordering "beer" in a pub sounds as absurd as
going to a restaurant and ordering "meat": the type must be specified.
In Italian restaurants in New York, a request for water will provoke a
question about brands (to which I reply "Tap water!"), but this is not
the general rule.

--
John Cowan                                   jcowan@reutershealth.com
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know

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