Timeline for Countable/uncountable nouns Rice vs Stars [closed]
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21 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 21, 2018 at 12:19 | history | closed |
Edwin Ashworth Rob_Ster user 66974 Nigel J Skooba - Stands Against AI |
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| Mar 20, 2018 at 12:51 | vote | accept | Arun | ||
| Mar 20, 2018 at 11:07 | comment | added | BillJ | @Arun Consider "We camped out under the million stars that form part of our universe", where "stars" is clearly a count noun. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:58 | comment | added | BillJ | No, you introduced the debate by throwing in (as usual) the lexeme "furniture", which is non-count. It is irrelevant in that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the OP's question, or established use. That many nouns have both count and non-count uses is not only well-known but obvious (I gave examples). And the term 'pluralisation' can be misleading since nouns like "alms", "belongings", clothes" are plural in form but are not count nouns. And "police" does combine with the higher numbers, so we can say "There are a hundred police in the van opposite". | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:23 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Chile, the wines of California, etc. I suppose a furniture expert might even need to speak of the furnitures of the Carolinas, etc. (although that seems more dubious). When knowledge of something becomes more specialized and we need to speak of different kinds of something or different sets of the generic thing, we sometimes pluralize what we had regarded as uncountable. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:23 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | And from Grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/grammarlogs: The pluralization of uncountable nouns will sometimes happen when they are used in specialized ways. For instance, for most of the world the word wine is uncountable, but my nephew, who is a wine merchant, needs to talk about the wines of ... | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:14 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @BillJ You reintroduced this debate here. It's rather precious to then accuse me of irrelevance. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:11 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | We've been through all this before. @Arun You can say 'there are 5 main stars in 'Cassiopeia'. You can't say 'there are 5 police/s in the van opposite'. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:11 | comment | added | Arun | @BillJ: But in the sentence "We camped out under the stars", we don't associate "stars" with any number. Shouldn't they be considered non-count? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:06 | comment | added | Zebrafish | sugar is countable in at least one sense, disaccharides are composed of two sugars, namely (simple sugars). | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:05 | comment | added | BillJ | The acid test for countability is the ability to combine with the cardinal numbers one, two, three, etc. Nouns that can't do this are noun-count. Note though that many nouns can be both count and non-count: "Would you like a cake" (count) ~ "Would you like some more cake?" (non-count). | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:59 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 21, 2018 at 12:19 | |||||
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:56 | comment | added | Arun | But, talking about the night sky, shouldn't "star" be used as a non-count noun? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:55 | comment | added | BillJ | And you be more careful about spouting nonsense. "Furniture" has no established use as a count noun. Look up the word "irrelevant". | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:53 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | @BillJ Do try to be more careful before pontificating. I've just said that this usage is non-count. And I've said before that some post-2002 authorities license the plural form in certain usage/s. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:52 | comment | added | BillJ | The word "furniture" is not a count noun. The fact that furniture happens to comprise tables, chairs etc., which are count nouns, is irrelevant. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:46 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Look up 'etically' here: this quickly accesses some of the earlier treatments such as this one. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:43 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | 'Uncountable' is a misnomer. Use 'non-count'. A non-count noun usage is one where you can't acceptably insert a numeral or equivalent. So 'There was broken furniture lying about the room' shows a non-count usage. You can't say 'There were three / 97 / a dozen / some / many broken furnitures lying about the room' . But furniture (the stuff you're talking about, not this usage of the noun 'furniture') is etically (intrinsically) countable: 3 chairs + 2 tables + 2 cabinets = 7 items). | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:42 | answer | added | Pam | timeline score: 3 | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:33 | review | First posts | |||
| Mar 20, 2018 at 10:11 | |||||
| Mar 20, 2018 at 9:31 | history | asked | Arun | CC BY-SA 3.0 |