Re: Chinese-style measure words in English?

From: Harlan Messinger (h.messinger_at_comcast.net)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 10:25:14 -0500

"Lee Sau Dan" <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote in message
news:87r7l88r5t.fsf@informatik.uni-freiburg.de...

What's strange to me is that some nouns *do* have pretty natural
units, but are really mass-nouns in English. It was hard to learn to
use them correctly: paper (***), sand (grain), rice (grain),
furniture (piece), etc. You MUST use a classifier when quantifying
these nouns. So unintuitive.

Paper is a material like metal and wood, so "*** of paper" isn't any
stranger than "*** of medal" or "stick of wood".

Furniture is an instrinsically mass word--"the stuff with which something is
furnished"--in much the same way as "equipment".

Sand and rice--they may come in units, but the tiny, tiny units weren't
being addressed when the words were applied to masses of them. What more can
be said?

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