Re: Some thoughts about Diversity and the CoC
On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 06:28:41PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I think my favorite example (this was from one of McWhorter's lectures) is
> that, in US English, one says "a can of corn" but "a can of peas." Why is
> "corn" singular but "peas" are plural? There's a complex grammatical
> explanation about mass nouns and count nouns, which doesn't really answer
> the question, since why is "corn" a mass noun but "peas" is a count noun?
> Well, there are some possible etymological explanations in US English, but
> we don't really know. There's no entirely satisfying explanation, it's a
> rather obscure corner of grammar, and most people are not going to be able
> to recite any grammatical rule for this. And yet "a can of corns" sounds
> obviously wrong, and if someone says that, they are probably either a
> toddler or someone who is not a native speaker of US English. (My
> recollection is that this specific rule is different in UK English.)
UK English and Hiberno-English both have the same rule for this specific
example, allowing for other dialect changes: we'd tend to say "tin"
rather than "can", and in this context we'd say "sweetcorn" rather than
"corn", but neither of those affect the mass/count distinction. I can't
speak for other English dialects.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find some other similar example where
there's a difference between US and UK, though! The one that
immediately comes to mind is that "Lego" tends to be treated as a count
noun in the US and as a mass noun (or in compounds such as "Lego
bricks") in the UK. Once speakers on each side get over calling each
other uneducated for saying it "wrongly" (which is a fascinating
sociolinguistic exercise in itself), you can come up with several
plausible reasons why this makes sense in each dialect context, but I've
never seen one that survives attempts at being extended into a
generalisable prescriptive rule.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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