Danny's Weblog

Asian languages -- miscellaneous

This section is for my observations about Asian languages other than those for which I have a separate individual folder, such as Cambodian and Thai, or for observations which are relevant to multiple Asian languages.

Additionally, there are some articles on the study of English as a foreign language for Asian students.

2005 Mar 29 [ Tue ]

Countable nouns in English, and dictionaries

Using the definite and indefinite articles correctly in English is very difficult. Learners make mistakes all the time, and most native English speakers are aware that they can't articulate the rules (although presumably they can grok the correct form in individual cases).

One poster on Slashdot (in a thread about the grammar checker in Microsoft Word) stated:

The ground rule is: always put "a" or "the" in front of a singular noun.

The poster may well be aware of this, but (in addition to many other exceptions such as headlines) a major exception is "uncountable nouns", ie nouns like "information", "sugar", "tenacity", which we cannot have 0, 1 or 2... of. (Actually, it's even more complicated: we might use "two sugars" to mean "two samples of sugar from different suppliers", or more likely "two servings of sugar", but that is really forming a plural of *a different sense of the noun*.)

This is non-trivial. When I was working in a translation department in Germany, it was very hard to get the Germans to understand that "Informations" sounds silly, because in German you can easily say "Informationen". Even in English, I find it hard to get people to agree with my point that "data", even though formed from a Latin plural, should be considered a singular noun precisely because it is uncountable: we never speak of "three data". One marker that a text has been created by a non-technical person is the use of "codes" to mean "pieces of software". Technical people use "code" as a non-countable noun but marketing, government and military types have no idea. (Foreigners even say "three softwares" but I've never heard a native English speaker say that.)

Anyway, my point is just that I have *never* seen an English dictionary which specified whether a noun is countable or not: apparently everybody is just supposed to know innately. If I write a book about English for Cambodians, I hope I have the grace to remember this point.

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