this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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It looks like we are not going to agree on what makes something countable, but I did appreciate the exchange.
Mathematicians talk about "countable infinity" and "uncountable infinity". The integers are countable, 1, 2, 3, ... forever. There is no way to count them all. But they can be counted.
Compare that to uncountable infinity: there are more Real Numbers in the uncountable infinity of fractions between 0 and 1 than in the entire countable infinity of the integers! Because they are not discrete like the integers. Discrete is not the right word. I'm not a mathematician. They're not countable.
In both of these cases, no human can count them all. But the countable infinity can be counted. Just like the water in the ocean, or the sand on the beach. God could count them, for instance.
In the end, we're using the word countable differently. We might have different worldviews about the nature of water and its importance. I'm ok with that :)
It sounds like you have a mathematics or science background. I’m actually a linguist with multiple degrees and who studied internationally at the postgraduate level. I’m speaking from the perspective of a linguist and referring to the semantic aspects of word usage. Count versus mass / countable versus uncountable is a very fundamental aspect of human language and in any pragmatic usage is very inflexible. When moving into specialist language use, pragmatics fall away and that precise usage can enter the space. My original comment is on the pragmatic use.
I think I may have realized in this thread that linguistic intuition is something that is sometimes counterintuitive to the average person in the way metaphysics can be, and perhaps challenging to acquire in a way that I have forgotten. You were probably the third person to make the same point and I may have been annoyed at having to defend something that is basic and recognized by anyone who studies language in pretty much any capacity.
Cheers
Yes, I do have a science background, which is why I love thinking about how a cup of water is full of molecules :)
Speaking only for myself, I understand that 'water' might not be a countable noun, but that doesn't make the underlying thing we call "water" uncountable as a real, tangible thing, and that was what I was trying to convey.
It seems like people might reasonably disagree about whether something is physically countable or not, but it was deeper than linguistics for me.
You might appreciate this: although a lot of scientists don't like people calling insects "bugs," I love how so many languages have a word for "small creepy-crawly animal" and I highly endorse the popular usage of bugs to include spiders, roly-polies, insects, etc. For this, I don't get why some biologists insist on applying the specialist description of living things to the semantic (?) grouping. Maybe you would put 'countable' in that category too. But to me, the idea that water is molecules makes it countable at a deep level, regardless of how our language talks about it.
I'm going to look up and learn more about countable/mass nouns now -- sorry to start out as part of that annoying group. Thanks for the thread :)
In the bugs topic, I also love how virtually nothing called “berry” is a berry and tons on things that you don’t think are berries (watermelon, bananas) are berries. Someone probably defined the term long after it was applied to everything.