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How is rice and sugar uncountable while star is not? Counting grains of rice and crystals of sugar is not practical, yes. But isn't counting stars nearly impossible?

Arun
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    'Uncountable' is a misnomer. Use 'non-count'. A non-count noun usage is one where you can't acceptably insert a numeral or equivalent. So 'There was broken furniture lying about the room' shows a non-count usage. You can't say 'There were three / 97 / a dozen / some / many broken furnitures lying about the room' . But furniture (the stuff you're talking about, not this usage of the noun 'furniture') is etically (intrinsically) countable: 3 chairs + 2 tables + 2 cabinets = 7 items). – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 09:43
  • Look up 'etically' here: this quickly accesses some of the earlier treatments such as this one. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 09:46
  • The word "furniture" is not a count noun. The fact that furniture happens to comprise tables, chairs etc., which are count nouns, is irrelevant. – BillJ Mar 20 '18 at 09:52
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    @BillJ Do try to be more careful before pontificating. I've just said that this usage is non-count. And I've said before that some post-2002 authorities license the plural form in certain usage/s. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 09:53
  • And you be more careful about spouting nonsense. "Furniture" has no established use as a count noun. Look up the word "irrelevant". – BillJ Mar 20 '18 at 09:55
  • But, talking about the night sky, shouldn't "star" be used as a non-count noun? – Arun Mar 20 '18 at 09:56
  • The acid test for countability is the ability to combine with the cardinal numbers one, two, three, etc. Nouns that can't do this are noun-count. Note though that many nouns can be both count and non-count: "Would you like a cake" (count) ~ "Would you like some more cake?" (non-count). – BillJ Mar 20 '18 at 10:05
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    sugar is countable in at least one sense, disaccharides are composed of two sugars, namely (simple sugars). – Zebrafish Mar 20 '18 at 10:06
  • @BillJ: But in the sentence "We camped out under the stars", we don't associate "stars" with any number. Shouldn't they be considered non-count? – Arun Mar 20 '18 at 10:11
  • We've been through all this before. @Arun You can say 'there are 5 main stars in 'Cassiopeia'. You can't say 'there are 5 police/s in the van opposite'. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 10:11
  • @BillJ You reintroduced this debate here. It's rather precious to then accuse me of irrelevance. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 10:14
  • And from Grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/grammarlogs: The pluralization of uncountable nouns will sometimes happen when they are used in specialized ways. For instance, for most of the world the word wine is uncountable, but my nephew, who is a wine merchant, needs to talk about the wines of ... – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 10:23
  • Chile, the wines of California, etc. I suppose a furniture expert might even need to speak of the furnitures of the Carolinas, etc. (although that seems more dubious). When knowledge of something becomes more specialized and we need to speak of different kinds of something or different sets of the generic thing, we sometimes pluralize what we had regarded as uncountable. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 20 '18 at 10:23
  • No, you introduced the debate by throwing in (as usual) the lexeme "furniture", which is non-count. It is irrelevant in that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the OP's question, or established use. That many nouns have both count and non-count uses is not only well-known but obvious (I gave examples). And the term 'pluralisation' can be misleading since nouns like "alms", "belongings", clothes" are plural in form but are not count nouns. And "police" does combine with the higher numbers, so we can say "There are a hundred police in the van opposite". – BillJ Mar 20 '18 at 10:58
  • @Arun Consider "We camped out under the million stars that form part of our universe", where "stars" is clearly a count noun. – BillJ Mar 20 '18 at 11:07

1 Answers1

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You've answered your own question here. You count "grains" of rice and "crystals" of sugar. The grains and crystals are countable. The material that they constitute ("sugar" and "rice") is not.

Stars, on the other hand, are entities in themselves. Although there are a great many of them and counting all of them individually is (as you point out) impractical, they are not clustered close together. So counting the small subset of visible stars in a specific area is achievable.

You could say that the equivalent of "grains" to "rice" is "stars" to "universe". We count the stars, not the universes. We count the grains, not the rice. (And yes, you could add words like "galaxy" or "nebula" in there, too, but again, these are entities in their own right.)

Pam
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  • Yes, Pam. Thank you. This leaves the second part of the question open. Shouldn't "stars" be uncountable too? – Arun Mar 20 '18 at 09:54
  • @Arun I've made an edit to account for "stars". – Pam Mar 20 '18 at 12:47
  • Yes. The key property is individuation. You can only count individuals, not masses which must be measured, nor abstractions like love that can't be measured. At a certain granularity, there is a grey area: rice is mass, but beans and lentils are count; even though they are roughly the same size, you have to say a bowl of rice and a bowl of beans and not the other way around. This is fairly arbitrary, but only at that granularity. – John Lawler Mar 20 '18 at 14:48