Re: Help me Count to 10

The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
In English, one can do the following.

[1] Count. "One, two, three, ..." or perhaps "one marble, two marbles,
three marbles, ..."

In situations where you'd say "one, two, three" without a noun in English, you'd generally do the same in Japanese. I'm not sure of the counter for marbles, but possibly it's "ko", which is used for small objects. Then you'd count marbles as ikko, niko, sanko, ....

[2] List ordinals. "First, second, third, ..."

That would be "ichiban, niban, sanban, ...." "Ban" is a counter for positions.

[3] Identify using ordinals. "The first item, the second item, ..."

This would be the -me suffix, e.g. sannenme "the third year" from sannen "three years".

I have no idea what the Japanese analogues to any of these would be, or
whether Japanese has additional analogues that would be hard to express in
pure English.

I don't think there's any fundamentally different way of counting in Japanese. Japanese does have two etymologically unrelated sets of counting numbers, one derived from Chinese (ichi, ni, san) and the other native (hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu). Sometimes they're interchangeable and other times you have to use one or the other, but there isn't really a difference in meaning between them. English has other sets of counting words, which are mostly handled with counters in Japanese:

once, twice, thrice ichido, nido, sando
double, triple, quadruple nibai, sanbai, yonbai
primary, secondary, ternary ichibanme no, nibanme no, sanbanme no
firstly, secondly, thirdly daiichi, daini, daisan

Other languages get downright peculiar. If I'm not mistaken, for
instance, at least one language requires slightly different linguistics
depending on whether one is counting sticks or balls.

You may be thinking of Japanese, where large cylindrical objects are counted ippon, nihon, sanbon, ... and large spherical objects are counted ikkyuu, nikyuu, sankyuu, ....

I'm assuming that "water", "dough", and "soup" might be "mass nouns" in
this context.

Yes, exactly. But also things like "furniture" which could just as easily be count nouns. "Pease" used to be a mass noun in English, but now it's been replaced by the count noun "pea", which is a back-formation.

-- Ben
.

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