1. Making Things
2. Count/Mass noun distinction
3. Late night pizza
I. via The Oatmeal
Earlier in the day I was perusing one my favorite blogs, Pharyngula (freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula) and came across a link to the latest Oatmeal comic/work … what-have-you.
As I work to finish my dissertation, a long-running torture and joke, I find myself in a similar situation asa mostly stay-at-home-academic/writer, and so the comic struck a chord and a nerve.
And like PZ (see: Pharyngula, above), I find myself haunted by the expression “inspiration is like food poisoning” …
II. Count/Mass Noun
A friend asked me in the chat channel whether German had the count- mass-noun distinction. The short answer is ‘yes.’
To contextualize a bit: count nouns have singular and plural forms, and take quantifiers. Mass nouns cannot take quantifiers. While count nouns are also ‘countable nouns,’ mass nouns are not identical with ‘collective nouns.’ There’s also no hard and fast distinction, no universal semantic or syntactic rule for them, and so on. The same noun — or at least ‘word’ in some sense — can be both a count noun and a mass noun in different circumstances.
Because English — like German and so many other languages we tend to be familiar with — have both types, it is actually more interesting to look at languages that do not have one or the other. Mandarin, for example, only has mass nouns. Nouns do not have singular and plural forms, and you can’t just put a one, two, each, or every in front of them; something close to an equivalent in English is using the “of + NOUN” or “UNIT + of + NOUN” construction: glass of milk, two glasses of milk (but not two milk), or each piece of furniture (not each furniture). Imagine doing that for every noun (person, dog, cat, book, car, house, rock, door, apple …)
See also: Evaluation of the Count-Mass Noun Distinction and Nouns; contrast Mass nouns, count nouns and non-count nouns: Philosophical aspects (Count/Mass is not the same as count+/count-!) and Count and Mass Nouns in Dene Suline (PDF) for a language that has what some might call ‘non-traditional’ count nouns!
What was interesting for me is the question about how universal the distinction is and whether it is ‘necessary’. In short, the example of Mandarin shows that not every language needs count nouns. The inverse is: are there languages with only count nouns, but not mass nouns? Susan Deborah Rothstein in “Events and Grammar” (page 91) argues that since count nouns and mass nouns each provide a way of quantifying, and that is redundant in a sense, we could look to see whether we can reduce that redundancy by eliminating one of the noun categories. She writes, “The first, which, however, we already found to be not viable, would be by making every noun countable” (thus, no mass nouns), and continues, “However, we observed that the elementary parts of liquids, pastes and the like are not readily accessible to our cognitive system. The inherent characteristics of these objects make it impractical to count by referring to their elementary parts. Thus the non existence of these languages has a reasonable explanation.” This is not ‘proof’ that such languages do not exist, but Rothstein provides an argument for why we would not expect to find them.
I feel like searching further … what seems like a reasonable argument from a given set of premises still gets shown up on a frequent basis by unexpected data points in the world. So I’ll pursue this more later.
III. Pizza
I got to go to dinner with Ms. S.’s parents while she had to go to work.
It’s an unfair world.
And evidently it has been a busy or stressful shift. And the show is opening tomorrow night. And and and … once I got home I found this stress communicated by text message. And I saw that what she might really want as dinner, rather than whatever she has planned (lentils and veggie burger?), is beer and pizza.
Our beer selection is limited. My pizza supplies are limited. I’m not going shopping. I’m not ordering out.
But why can’t I through together an approximately 5:3 ratio of flour to water (by weight), with a pinch of salt, a good amount of yeast (for rapid rising), add a pinch of sugar for a boost, knead in some oregano and basil … pull out some cheddar, tomato paste, cherry tomatoes, and fresh spinach … and get a variation on a pizza margherita in the oven, out of the oven, and on a plate by Ms. S.’s arrival home around 11:15?
I think I can. Which is why dough I mixed an hour ago is rising in the kitchen and about to be rolled out to be put in the oven in a bit. Now to make sauce …
