Mass effect

[undyingking]

One of the things I love about English is the quirks of its structure which native speakers aren't consciously aware of, but which bedevil learners. An example is the way it handles mass and count nouns. Maybe you got taught this sort of thing at school, but I never did: so here it is now, some actually useful grammar.

A count noun is the usual

Comments

[huggyrei]

Hang on, isn't it 'I own three fishes'?

I was in a school year where the then-government decided to switch maths and literacy years around in primary, then hanged their mind and switched it bak the year after. As a result, we got two years of maths, but never actually learned all the grammar definitions and construction rules. By the time we went to senior school the teachers just assumed we knew and used words I'd never heard of. I only figured out what a noun or an adjective was once we started learning French. Before that, I just spoke and wrote English the way I'd been reading it, with no knowledge of rules apart from things I'd unconsciously grasped; thankfully I always read a lot of books.

[undyingking]

I did get taught some grammar at school, but most of it I've subsequently learned was wrong, so you might have had a lucky escape.

I actually think that it's better to learn by mimicking usage, rather than by learning a bunch of rules which (in English at least) always turn out to have reams of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.

[undyingking]

'Three fishes' is generally considered as 'incorrect' in standard English, but it certainly is nonetheless used quite a bit.

See eg: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=three+fish%2Cthree+fishes&year_start=1980&year_end=2008&corpus=6&smoothing=3&share=&search_plus_one=form&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthree%20fish%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthree%20fishes%3B%2Cc0

[mr_malk]

Almost all English (countable) nouns can be legitimately pluralised by adding an s (or es), and I think that "fish" falls into that category, as does "cannon" - much to the annoyance of a friend of mine who insisted that I was wrong about this on one occasion. Some nouns (and "sheep" is a notable example) simply jar if you add an s to them.

I'm not the greatest champion of common usage dictating correctness, but in this case I tend to lean that way.

[undyingking]

The long-term usage graph for 'three cannons' is interesting: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=three+cannon%2Cthree+cannons&year_start=1880&year_end=2008&corpus=6&smoothing=3&share=&search_plus_one=form&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthree%20cannon%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthree%20cannons%3B%2Cc0

I'm sure you're right that almost all such nouns do to some extent take what might perhaps be called 'the toddler's plural'. I wonder if anyone's done an analysis of which do so more or less commonly, and speculated as to whether there's a meaningful pattern.

[mr_malk]

Those are fascinating graphs... as to whether anyone's analysed that aspect of grammar in detail... who knows? If not, perhaps one day I will do a post-grad myself and take it on (but don't hold your breath)!

For what it's worth, the Chambers dictionary lists both fish and fishes, and cannon and cannons, as standard plural forms, and does not prefer one above the other in either case. Where did you get the term "toddler's plural" by the way? Did you coin it yourself?

[undyingking]

I did: it seemed apt given the well-known research on 'wug[s]' :-)