Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

New hypothesis: Words like "corn", "wheat" were used mainly by traders, on
stockmarkets and so on. The people who buy and sell such things don't really
bother how it looks like, for them it's just the same as "cotton", "oil" or
"gold". But I never heard of any stockmarket for peas, although of course it
also had to be bought and sold.

In French we could say "il fait dans le pois", or "dans la lentille" ("dans la
tomate", and so on), meaning 'he handles about peas, lentles, tomatoes". This
is a familiar way of speaking (somehow despising). It is a king of denying the
essence of the thing we're talking about, meaning it's just something to buy
and sell, whatever it may look like.

Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
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.

On the other hand, I have caught myself treating "noodles" as a mass
noun on a couple of occasions.

It's been argued that mass-count in English is a gender distinction, and
to an extent, I agree.


Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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