Re: USAGE: Count and mass nouns

Yes, about peas, there seems to be little logic there. Maybe one reason is that, if
you open the natural enveloppe of peas, you only see a few of them there, but
if you refer to corn (un épi de maïs), there are immediately a lot of grains
(hard to count) ???

"Any solid can be count".
What about clay ?

Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:


Yet, what about "peas"? In English (the standard, at least), corn is
mass, so that you have to refer to "kernels of corn", but "peas" are
count, so that you can refer to "peas", you don't have to say *kernels
of peas or some other usage. Yet, at one time, "pease" was mass. And
in modern times, the word "data" has become, in many people's speach, a
mass noun, while historically it was a plural count noun.



Any solid *can* be count. Liquids are more naturally mass. But, even
liquids can be made count if you define the term as "drop of" or a
convenient amount, either vague or a specifically defined amount. I
don't know if any language does that, tho. The few that I know anything
about mass/count do still use liquids like "water" as mass. They just
don't necessarily make a grammatical distinction, such that, e.g., in
Spanish, "mucho(s)" can be translated as "much" or "many"



---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes

Replies