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John: > Jordan DeLong scripsit: > > > Historically, "pease" was a mass noun as well, covering the same space > > > as "bean", but it came to be construed as a plural count noun "peas", > > > and a new singular "pea" was constructed for it. (Semantic > > > differentiation came later, and we can still talk of either black-eyed > > > peas or black-eyed beans.) > > You don't comment on this point, but it is precisely the refutation of > And's argument (I think) that some nouns are "naturally" mass, some count. > Pease changed from a mass noun to a count noun, but nothing about the > legume itself changed in any way, just how it was conceptualized by > English-speakers. When translating, then "lo dembi" is "one or more > beans", but "lo rismi" is "one or more quantities of rice (perhaps rice > grains, perhaps not). But when thinking Lojbanically, beans and "rices", > or pease and rice, represent a perfect parallelism. I can't remember if I responded to this. In brief, what I meant to claim is that it is relatively more and less natural to see things as having intrinsic boundaries. Granular stuff like peas is a well-known borderline case. Of course, the grammaticization itself serves as an instruction on how to conceptualize. So singular mass "kudos" is conceptualized as uncountable, but American English plural "kudos" must be conceptualized as consisting of countable elements. --And.