Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

Oh, right ... as in "I eat toast" therefore toast is an adverb. Nice.

Oh, and: "It suggests that English AND Spanish are adverbs of a sort" (caps
for emphasis) would have been less grammatically incorrect.

Cheers,
Daniel.

As we all stood and listened, morrison@lsd.net.nz sung the following
words:

A mass noun is a name for a collection of things where the emphasis is
on the group, not the individual elements.

So if you use the word "English" in the sense of the people of England,
then it is a mass noun:

"The English are all smelly and have no sense of humour"

In this sense, the word encompasses individual Englishmen and -women,
but your emphasis is on them as a collective mass.

On the other hand, if you use the word "English" as the name of the
language, then it's regular (or "count") noun.

Using a different example perhaps makes it clearer:

mass noun:
"The cutlery was shiny"
"A cutlery was on the table" - this is clearly incorrect
"I saw two cutleries" - this is also incorrect

count noun:
"The forks were shiny"
"A fork was on the table"
"I saw two forks"

As you can see, a "count" noun is so-called because you can count it.

If we go back to the word "English", we cannot count it if we use it to
mean "Englishmen and -women", but we can count it if we use it to mean
the language; we have to come up with a slightly uncommon way of using
it to demonstrate this point, though:

"Of the many Englishes spoken in the world today, the American variety
is clearly the most widely spoken"

It's not exactly elegant, and is more likely to be used in speech than
writing.  But the reason that it doesn't usually have a plural isn't
because it's a mass noun (which it isn't), it's because it's the name
of something that is usually only thought of as existing as a single
specimen.  If there was a completely unrelated language that, by
coincidence, was also called English, then a plural would be more
natural:

"Of the two Englishes spoken today, the most widespread is the language
that originated in England; the language of the same name that is
spoken in northern Thailand is spoken by only a few thousand people"

"Lego" is a bit of an oddity, because it's a Latin word used by a
Danish company; and in this case, is being encountered in an
English-speaking country.  Individual "bricks" are sometimes talked
about as "Lego(e)s", but I think in British English at least it would
generally be considered incorrect to do so in the written language.  Of
course they're a toy, so it's just as likely to be children talking
about it as adults, so it's a bit trickier to apply the usual rules of
what is "correct" or not.

Why tilt at windmills?

I know it's your specialty, but you're coming off like Don.

I notice you skipped Greenbaum. In other words, you're just not willing
to listen to those who know better than you.