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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

one that I often hear foreign speakers struggling with is “hair”. 1 hair, 2 hairs, a whole head of hair. seemingly, if it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form. but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural.

English is an absolute mess

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Japanese is worse. You count "1 thing", "2 thing", "3 thing", except the word for "thing" changes depending on the shape of the thing you are counting.

So thin flat things like paper or shirts are 1 mai, 2 mai, 3 mai, while to count books you say 1 satsu, 2 satsu, 3 satsu.

Long round things like pencils or umbrellas go 1 pon, 2 hon, 3 bon, 4 hon, 5 hon, 6 pon, etc (yeah you read that right).

There are different counter words for different kinds of animals, small things, vehicles, shoes, drinks, people, etc.

https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-numbers-co...

christ that is horrendous, especially pon hon bon hon hon pon. is there some kind of historical logic behind it?

It's for a better sounding liaison depending on the preceding number

ippon nihon sanbon yonhon gohon roppon

That's just consonant mutation[0][1], like how english speakers say "a pencil" but "an umbrella"[2]. (Ie, "hon", "pon", and "bon" are all the same word, just pronounced differently due to environment.) The fact that ほぼぽ (ho bo po) are all the same underlying letter, just with different diacritics, kind of hints at this.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_mutation

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku

2: Of course, English pretty much only does the conspicous verson of this for that one word, because English.

> but then it could be absolutely correct to say “the many hairs on my head”, an uncountable which retains the plural.

That's not an uncountable. It's the count form, explicitly being counted by the count-noun-exclusive determiner many. (The mass form of many is much.)

The entire difference between "the hair on my head" and "the hairs on my head" is that in the second one you're counting the hairs.

> it’s countable it follows normal rules, if it’s not, it goes back to singular form.

You'd have a hard time counting all the stars, but "sky of star" doesn't work like "head of hair" does. I love how expressive English is, but it's got issues for sure.

All languages are a mess. Imagine instead of specific noun rules, every single noun had a rule by way of a gender. And to conjugate “boat” or “table” you need to know its arbitrary gender.

English, unlike a lot of the big European languages, doesn’t have a central controlling body and hasn’t gone through powerful standardisation efforts - beyond dictionaries (i.e. consistent spelling and meaning). many (most?) European languages follow pretty consistent conjugation and pronunciation rules. yeah there are a few exceptions in each case, but nowhere near the scale of English.

grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves

> grammatical gender is in most cases only really as hard as learning the words themselves

That's a really good point actually, one I've not heard before.

I think it's still harder learning from an ungendered language, since you naturally think of mapping word:word, but you also need word:gender now. With your point though, maybe I can have an easier time of it by trying to consciously think of it instead as word:(word, gender), if that makes sense.

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