#87440 - Collective nouns

[Katya]

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/87440/

I don't have a bone to pick with the asker or answerer of this particular question, but collective nouns are a huge pet peeve of mine, from a linguistics perspective. They play into the idea that in order to "properly" speak a language, you have to learn a bunch of secret, hidden rules. There are certainly some collective nouns that are in common enough use to be a part of natural language ("flock," "pack," "school"), but there's no descriptive basis for saying that "murder of crows" is the "correct" term when it's much less common than something like "flock of crows." (A COHA search returns 24 hits for "flock of crows" over a 200-year period, while "murder of crows" only returns one hit from the year 2000.)

[Zedability]

Yeah I've always felt like some of the more obscure ones were just people trying to be cute.

[Digit]

Are Chinese measure words similar in that you need to know the Right one for the thing you're talking about. If I remember correctly, ge is pretty commonly used, but many classes of things have a Right measure word that should be used.

[Katya]

Are Chinese measure words similar in that you need to know the Right one for the thing you're talking about. If I remember correctly, ge is pretty commonly used, but many classes of things have a Right measure word that should be used.

They might be similar in the sense that there are some that are very commonly used (and you are expected to know the difference between them) and others that are only used by very educated people or are only used historically. (It's been too long since I studied Mandarin, but I get the impression that the number of classifiers that are commonly used is much higher than the number of collective nouns commonly used in English.)

Grammatically, they're a little different because we can still count individual objects without using collective nouns. Instead, the collective noun is a substitute for the word "group," more or less. So:

one wolf
two wolves
*a group of wolves (* = an example that is wrong)
a pack of wolves

However, we do effectively have measure words in English when we refer to certain kinds of foods:

*one lettuce
*two lettuces
one head of lettuce
two heads of lettuce

Also, one ear of corn, one loaf of bread, etc.

[Whistler]

oh, Japanese has special counting words for just about everything it seems like--they go after the number depending on the thing you're counting, and the first few are often irregular. It's a real pain in the butt. Counters for cylindrical objects, pieces of paper, people, etc. I guess it's like heads of lettuce, leaves of paper, or cups of milk.