I feel like I've said this before, but maybe I haven't said it here.

[conuly]

Just because a word has an unmarked plural that doesn't mean, ipso facto, that it's a mass noun.

Fish, sheep, moose - these are all count nouns. You can tell because you can count them without having to use special measure words like "head", "piece", "ton", or "cup". You can have ten fish, twenty sheep, a million moose. Or just one.

Mass nouns, by contrast, really are uncountable except in a small limited number of circumstances where the measure word is sort of implied. You can't have one rice, you have to have one grain of rice or one cup of rice or one ton of rice.

Comments

[fox]

You count mass nouns when you count types of the mass, not tokens or units. “Our extensive list includes more than twenty wines,” for example, although of course you can’t count wine.

[steorra]

Sometimes also when, as conuly said, a unit is implied.

"I'd like two coffees, please" - two cups of coffee.

[fox]

Right. And interestingly, in the type-or-variety case I mentioned, I think you can *only* count otherwise-mass nouns that way; “that combination orchard/distillery makes three whiskeys and grows *four apples” — it’d have to be “four varieties of apple” or something like that. (I’m not sure that’s 100% accurate because I can’t decide if a winery would be okay with four wines and ?five grapes.)

[steorra]

Hmm, yeah, interesting!

[pauamma]

Thinking of plural fish, what is the origin of (IIRC) "thank God and little fishes"?

[ioplokon]

Trying to remember where this matters in english (less/fewer?) - I actually ran into it in french recently but couldn't remember the term or exact concept of count nouns and had to try to independently derive it in order to explain (bc advice is noncount in english but the french conseil is count)

[conuly]

I want to be extremely clear about this.

In English, "less than" can be used both with count and mass nouns. The preposterous idea that it cannot was literally invented by some dude named Robert Baker in 1770, and it doesn't count. It's not a real rule. The technical term is "made up zombie rule".

It is not a rule.

However, it is true that "much" is for mass nouns and "many" for count nouns.

[ioplokon]

Ah yes, much/many is the one. In French it comes up a lot more (du vs de) but in English it's like, just lurking in the dark waiting to crop up unexpectedly. I can never remember if less/fewer is a rule-rule or a "my old boss's rule"-rule (which, then again, is, in fact, the realest rule from a practical perspective)

[low_delta]

Off topic, are you future-dating your posts?

[conuly]

I'm living in the future.

[low_delta]

Excellent!

[conuly]

More seriously, I hate having blank spots in my calendar, but I don't actually post every single day, and this turned out to be a better solution than trying to backdate if I skip a post.