Speaking of Words by By MICHAEL FERBER
English and many other languages distinguish between count nouns, which refer to entities that can be counted, and mass nouns, which refer to entities that cannot. Count nouns, such as dog, child, and idea, can take a plural ending (dogs, children, ideas) and can follow a (or an) as well as numbers and other quantifiers (a dog, three children, several ideas). Mass nouns, such as blood, mud, and happiness, cannot be made plural and cannot follow a or quantifiers. Both kinds may follow the, this, and that (That dog rolled in the mud). Before count nouns we say fewer, before mass nouns less: Fewer dogs rolled in less mud. We can say more before both kinds.
People who speak languages that lack this distinction, or include somewhat different sets of nouns in the two categories, often make mistakes in English. When we find, “Three Happinesses Soup” on a Chinese restaurant menu we know the menu-writer is not a native speaker of English. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean make no distinction of noun types, and they have no markers for the plural; their nouns behave like mass-nouns.
In English we make use of countable units for mass nouns, many of them standardized: a slice of bread, a few drops of blood, two glasses of wine, a sum of money. Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” as if these two abstract mass nouns could be put on a scale and weighed. Abraham Lincoln spoke of “the last full measure of devotion,” rightly leaving it vague as to what this measure might be.
Of course many mass nouns can be made into count nouns. Kindness, like most abstract nouns ending in –ness, is usually a mass noun, but we can thank people for their many kindnesses. In my school cafeteria line I sometimes asked for two butters for my bread or two milks to drink, instead of two pats of butter or two cartons of milk. It is more difficult to make count nouns into mass nouns, but there is one example of it I cannot forget: “Ick! There is porcupine all over the road!”
Poets have sometimes exploited the possibility of squeezing mass nouns into the count-noun category. Keats liked words that ended in –ness, such as dewiness, clearness, nearness, silkiness, faintness, and leafiness, and he sometimes pluralizes them, as when he describes the flowing water of a little stream as “hurrying freshnesses.” That is from an early poem (“I Stood Tip-Toe”) and may not strike us as memorable, but in a late poem that many think his greatest (“To Autumn”) Keats takes a participle and makes it a plural noun. He seats the figure of Autumn beside a cider press, where “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.” “Oozings” stays in the mind; so does “hours by hours.”
A short, dense poem in a very different mode is Schlachtfeld (“Battlefield”), by August Stramm (1915), a German Expressionist poet who was killed on the Eastern front shortly after he wrote it. Much of its grim power lies in its distorting of mass-nouns into count-nouns. Here are the three middle lines: Blute filzen Sickerflecke / Roste krummen / Fleische schleimen (“bloods clot ooze-stains / rusts crumble / fleshes slime.” In each line a mass-noun is made plural and the subject of a plural verb. To have put these lines in proper German, with the equivalent of “pools of blood” or “pieces of flesh,” would have been effective enough, but not nearly as ghastly. Adding to the horror is the transformation of the noun Schleim into a verb, “to slime.” It is as if the language itself crumbles, turns inside out, or slimes in order to convey the sights of the battlefield after the battle; it is as if the language is another victim of the Schlacht.
Languages that make no distinction between count and mass make use of a special set of counter words to make mass nouns countable, much like drop and pat in the examples above. In Japanese ni by itself means “two.” If you are counting birds you add the syllable -wa to it (suzume niwa “two sparrows”), if you are counting small animals you add –hiki (inu nihiki “two dogs”), if you are counting cylindical things you add –hon (empitsu nihon “two pencils”), and so on. There are quite a few of these, and my one year in Japan was not time enough for me to get them all straight, though I liked the concept. I did learn to say “May I have five cylinders of pencil, please.”
There is another kind of noun in English that does not take plural endings but you can count it. Many of these are animals that are hunted or domesticated: sheep, deer, moose, elk, salmon, trout. These invariant nouns seem to suggest that sheep or salmon make up a mass, or a group, the members of which are not normally individuated, but the pattern is arbitrary: we speak of ten sheep but also ten goats. You would think sheep, of all animals, would take a plural, since when we want to fall asleep we count sheep, not goats!
And there is another set of nouns that only come in plurals. You can have a pair of scissors, but not one scissor. Trousers, too, only come in pairs, like jeans and glasses. But it’s not all about pairs. You wear clothes, you see the remains of the dead, you eat leftovers. We normally send greetings or offer thanks, though sometimes one thank may be all we care to offer, and my draft order many years ago began with a miserly “Greeting.”
All of these quirks in English nouns are yet another reason I sometimes wonder how anybody ever learns English who did not grow up with it. If I knew another language as well as I know English, no doubt, I would wonder about that language too. But English is the world language, and it must have inflicted hours of confusion on a billion people trying to understand why we can say goats but not sheeps.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.
