Mass noun | Hacker News Reader

Mass noun

en.wikipedia.org

65 pointsdcminter85 comments

I've heard some people (I think mostly in the UK?) treat corporation names as count nouns, as in "Jagex are" (or "Facebook are") rather than "Jagex is". I can see how this makes sense if you think of a corporation as fundamentally comprising a group of individual people, but it still sounds very strange to my ear.

I don't think this has anything to do with grammatical matters like count/mass nouns. It's just that a word for a collective can often be used either to refer to the collective as a whole, or to its individual members.

> Manchester City is a team with a long history.

> Manchester City are lined up on the field.

The count/mass noun issue comes into play when one is counting the thing in question, in which case corporations are clearly count nouns. E.g. you'd refer to several new Facebook-like corporations as "a new crop of Facebooks", not "..of Facebook".

People nevertheless still say “Manchester City are a team” (and that sounds correct to my UK ear).

Sure, and they sometimes say "Manchester City is lined up on the field." There's no single rule, it's a question of what's emphasized.

I don’t think that is at all common in English English.

I suspect that you are younger than me (59) and that you have been influenced by US usage.

Younger than you and in the US and I don't know anyone who would use "are" here.

I think e.g. Facebook as a product is singular: "Facebook is a social network".

But Facebook as a company is plural: "Facebook are certain that metaverse is going to be big". This is because a company cannot think and be certain, so the full form is actually "Folks at Facebook are certain that metaverse is going to be big", and it makes perfect grammatical sense.

I'm a bit wary of offering a logical explanation for something that is less reasoned and more habitual/cultural, but if I had to, I'd say corporations present a single unified posture that is not necessarily reflective of the posture of any single constituent of the corporation. Thus, it is somewhat fallacious to attribute that (carefully curated) posture to any(/many/most/all) of the individuals within that corporation.

Incidentally, I think it's funny (but justifiable) that you used "is" here:

> But Facebook as a company is plural

I think the implied statement is "the word for Facebook as a company is plural".

I agree that "Folks (at Facebook) are certain..." sounds right, but less sure about "Facebook are certain...".

Why is "folks" the right way to think about that? Why is it not "Mark (Zuckerberg) (at Facebook) is certain..."?

Are you singular, or the amalgamation of constituent cells?

I are both, really

Yes, deciding the grammatical number of a noun based on its meaning rather than its form is common in British English: “My family are coming to see me.” “The government have decided to….”

> Jagex is powerless against bots.

This sounds natural to me.

Perhaps it makes sense if you hunk of it as a company (inherently a mass noun) rather than a corporation (i.e. a “body”, inherently a count noun).

I’m from UK and “Jagex is” sounds equally weird. What pronoun would you use for a corporation? I would use “they”. Would you use “It”?

In the US, "they" is a pretty common singular, non-gendered pronoun. I could see either "they" or "it" being used, depending on sentence structure, but not necessarily due to plurality or countability.

But even when "they" is used as a singular pronoun, its verb conjugation doesn't change from its plural variant. It's still "they are", even when singular.

“You” works the same way, for the same reason: originally it was only plural (and “you” started to be used as a singular later than “they”).

Notice “skate” versus “skates” in these cases:

- Alice skates; Alice is a skater.

- Alice and Bob skate; Alice and Bob are skaters.

- She skates; she is a skater.

- You skate; you are a skater.

- You skate; you are skaters.

- They skate; they are a skater.

- They skate; they are skaters.

On introspection, I think I would/have used both "it" and singular (agender) "they" for corporations.

I forget where I read it but the intentional inversion of countable and mass nouns is a good source of morbid humour in English like "I was reversing my car, heard a yelp, and discovered cat all over the driveway".

Also sexual humor and innuendo.

Interesting fact is that mass nouns are not always the same in different languages. In German information is count noun and has plural case (Informationen). English spoken in continental Europe often carries the traces of other languages, so you may encounter in local documents written in English by non-native speaker something like „informations“.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English

Even in English, depending on who you talk to, "data" might be either count or mass. (I am solidly in the mass camp.)

It's pretty clearly used as a mass noun. Nobody would ever say 3 data (as opposed to 3 data points). Maybe once data was the plural of datum, but today datum isn't even really a word. Nobody says "this datum", they say "this data point".

Unfortunately, I have absolutely heard people say "this datum" and "these data" -- admittedly not "three data", but certainly in the style of a count noun, and not in the style of a mass noun. If they used it as a mass noun, they would say "this data", not "these data".

If you need to take an interview to keep your unemployment checks coming, just treat it like a singular count. One mention of “datas” during a technical round and you’ll be on your way.

My brother speaks seven languages and likes to talk about his challenges in teaching mass nouns to students in South Korea.

For some scientific disciplines, code (software) is not a mass noun. “I wrote a code that does processes the data files” is acceptable, even though it sounds wrong to my ears.

"does processes" is incorrect however

Whoops! I originally had “does X”, then changed it to make it less abstract.

I'm glad someone else noticed this. It drives me unreasonably crazy.

Yes! Like 'data' - it's singular ffs, so say 'the data in this paper shows' not 'the data show'. Looking at you TWiV!!

Maybe if it still makes sense semantically to replace 'data' with 'data points', then the plural is ok. However mostly we are talking about a 'wodge' of data, with discussion, caveats, etc, more than a simple list of 'datums'.

I'm pretty prescriptivist when it comes to grammar, but I also think that "data" should be referred to in the way you describe, and for those reasons. When people say "data" they generally mean "dataset", which is unambiguously singular. It just doesn't make sense to say "dataset" when "data" will do.

I would argue that prescriptivism in English still refers solely to English. The idea that since data is plural in Latin, it must also be plural in English doesn't follow for me. Plenty of words change plurality when being taken into another language, e.g.

* Laos is plural in French but singular in English.

* Cherise is singular in French, but was rebracketed as a plural in English (and then transformed to cherry as the singular).

Wow, super interesting. Apparently that is called "back-formation", and applies to other words like "caper", "pea", and "burgle" (from "burglar"). [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation

"Data" as a grammatic plural seems to be more common in UK english than US.

I think the way to properly pluralize it is by adding a unit, the same way we'd do with words like "information" (bits of information), "work" (Joules of work), or other meta/physical quantities (rays of sunshine, pangs of heartache, etc.).

I think the difference is in the perspective. The data is the substance you process, while the data are the observations or measurements you analyze. People who use "data" as plural tend to be more interested in the content than in operating the machinery.

‘Data’ is the Latin plural, so the traditional prescriptivist advice to say ‘the data are’ is based on the assumption that the word is grammatically plural, not any argument about semantics. There are actually lots of grammatically plural nouns that are used to refer to things that can’t be split into discrete chunks. For example, while ‘the news’ in English has been reanalyzed as singular, it remains ‘las noticias’ in Spanish - without any implication that a specific number of discrete news items are being referred to.

Data are plural when you can also refer to a single datum. Data is singular if it's a mass noun, like water.

There is a similar conundrum with media / medium.

Just because it can be singular doesn't mean that it must be singular.

What gives you the idea that data is singular? And then what is datum?

Ya, what is a datum? Is that like a piece of data?

I've heard that data is actually supposed to be plural, but that "correct" usage is so far outside of my experience that it just seems weird and confusing.

The one I actually find annoying though is when people use "an" before a word that starts with a (pronounced) h, like "an historic building". It's like, dude, I know you're trying to seem all smart and superior and it isn't working. (Of course, if they said it with a french accent and a silent h that would make more sense.)

> The one I actually find annoying though is when people use "an" before a word that starts with a (pronounced) h, like "an historic building". It's like, dude, I know you're trying to seem all smart and superior and it isn't working. (Of course, if they said it with a french accent and a silent h that would make more sense.)

This is something that has puzzled me as well. My wife, a historian (not "an historian!") will write this way, and when I've asked her about it she says it's just the proper way. When I looked into the history of it, I concluded that it probably made sense for the British (who say "historian" with a somewhat silent "H"), and probably for early Americans. But for those of us who speak Standard American English, it seems somewhere between unnecessary and stuffy.

I wonder how spell checking software deal with this? IIRC it's an exception for words starting with "H" where there emphasis is not on the first syllable (which would result in the "H" being enunciated).

I don't know for sure, but I suspect (in keeping with the fetishization of Latin that motivates many prescriptivist rules, like the injunction to never split an infinitive) that this arises from Ancient Greek[0], wherein there is not a separate letter "H" but rather a modification ("breath", if I remember rightly?) on the vowel. If you (mis)apply this rule to English, "hospital" starts with a vowel.

[0] this might be true in Modern Greek as well, I don't know - but English professors don't have such a raging boner for the modern version.

> like the injunction to never split an infinitive

Whoa, whoa, I believe you mean "the injunction never to split an infinitive"! /s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPq9nr4r_4 :D

How do you pronounce the sentence

“This is a historic building”

out loud? I don’t pronounce the h. I propose we start writing it as “an ‘istoric” to correct the mismatch.

If I may ask, which dialect of English do you speak that the "h" is silent in "historic"?

I’m from New England, but not like Boston or Rural Maine, so I don’t have one of those super strong paak tha caa accents.

It isn’t always silent, just when preceded by… a vowel I think? I dunno, I’m in public so I don’t want to look like a weirdo trying out test sentences.

I say hiss-storic but have always used "an" as the sound still fits the aural pattern rule in my head. It never even occurred to me that people would ever think it was wrong or pretentious to use "an". Though, I was always conscious that "a historic" wasn't wrong, either; yet it still looks and sounds off to me, like someone is deliberately exaggerating a hard h sound.

I say "historic" with more of an "H" than "hour" (which I pronounce the same as "our").

> Ya, what is a datum? Is that like a piece of data?

Yes. It’s like a fact. It’s a thing that’s known. The more common modern equivalent would be “data point”.

Interestingly there seems to be a trend to refer to an individual fact point as a "factoid". I wonder where that originated.

EDIT: I just looked it up and a factoid is a manufactured fact, coined by Norman Mailer in 1973. I seems many use it differently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_te...

Do what now? I wonder what accent you have and which ones you’ve regularly heard spoken. For me, using “an” is essentially mandatory, because there is absolutely no “h” sound at the beginning of “historic” at normal speaking speed. It’s just like “it has been an honor” or “it will take an hour.” The idea that it’s being done deliberately to sound superior is hysterical.

> I wonder what accent you have and which ones you’ve regularly heard spoken

Not parent, but I have the same experience as parent. I am from CA and have lived in PA and DC as well. I also studied linguistics in college and so have a reasonably well-tuned ear for this.

It is absolutely not "hysterical" to say that people do this to sound superior. The vast majority of Americans who say "an historic" on a regular basis that I've come across are historians. I have hung out with plenty of other well-educated and pedantic folks (in linguistics, economics, and law), and even they don't do this. YMMV, of course. From where do you hail?

The first time I realised that Americans drop the "h" in herb I thought it was some hoity-toity affectation, but apparently it's the way you say it! (Aussie here and I think Brits and Kiwis keep the H )

We are weird about herbs! Ask me how I say "basil"...

Out of curiosity, does that mean you pronounce "historic" substantially different from "history"? And how about "the historic" as opposed to "a(n) historic"?

I'm not a native speaker, but the thought of essentially pronouncing "the 'istory of ..." or "the 'istoric ..." feels a bit comical, but perhaps that's what you do to be consistent?

With “historic” the stress is on the second syllable. With “history” the stress is on the first syllable.

True. Interestingly, while I'm pretty sure that I automatically do that correctly, I don't perceive it as a substantial difference.

So perhaps part of the explanation is around how speakers of different languages / accents perceive emphasis.

That's interesting, I don't think I've heard a native English speaker say historic with a silent h. Which part of the world are you from?

To be fair, if the h is silent then it actually makes sense.

By analogy with the example from the article, water, data : datum :: water : drop.

It's a mass noun, per the article. Considered grammatically singular.

One interesting example from Latin is the word "virus", which roughly means "slime" -- being a mass noun, it has no classically attested plural.

I think that if it had a classical plural, it would be virora (like corpus -> corpora, tempus -> tempora) but ultimately the concept of "a virus" is a modern invention.

'Virus' is a neuter second-declension noun, while 'corpus' and 'tempus' are third-declension nouns. So, if you want to use 'virus' in plural maybe the best form is 'vira'.

'Virus' is a neuter second-declension noun

Citation needed. As far as I'm aware, there is no classical attestation for either second or third declension.

virus is second-declension neuter (genitive singlular viri, not *viroris), therefore the plural should be vira, as recommended by Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin

Pet peeve mass nouns wrongly used in the plural:

  codes  ("e.g. download the source codes")
  advices
  feedbacks
  evidences
  moneys  ("e.g. how much moneys does this cost", but "exchange of moneys" or "source of moneys" indicating variability of payment amounts is fine )
  datas
  syntaxes
  works (e.g. "thank you all for your hard works")
  experiences (e.g. "work experiences" on a CV)
  informations
  spaces (leave enough spaces for references)
  businesses (we have businesses to take care of)
  medias (share to social medias)
  softwares / hardwares

Fewer/less and 'countable' enter the room.

In the UK, “Lego” is treated as a mass noun, whereas the U.S. always seems to treat it as countable, “Legos”.

Historically “pease” was a mass noun, before it became the countable noun “peas”.

Drinks can be either, if the unit is assumable: “much water”; “3 waters” (meaning 3 bottles of water).

I suspect that “sheep” and “fish” are behaving the same way, like “cattle”.

>In the UK, “Lego” is treated as a mass noun, whereas the U.S. always seems to treat it as countable, “Legos”.

Both of those are incorrect as far as the LEGO Group is concerned.

"The Trademark must always be written in capital letters. The LEGO name is always spelled in all capital letters and the bricks (and/or elements) must always be referred to as “LEGO bricks” (or “LEGO elements”) – never “LEGOs” or “legos”."

As the cofounder of a streaming service with a 4-letter all-caps name that was misspelled 80% of the time in media coverage, I feel their pain.

But also, they can pry my legos from my cold dead hands.

What about "police", is that a mass noun? I feel like my English is pretty much error free at this point but I still sometimes mess this one up. I might say "the police is coming" (as I'm running the other way) but the correct phrase is "the police are coming".

I’m not sure if “Police” is a considered a mass noun, but it is inherently plural as per its definition which is “a collection of enforcement officers.” There is no singular form but it is also can be used as an adjective and a verb.

that's a good one.

i think that's right though- 'police officer' would of course be a regular singular noun, while 'the police' could represent any mass or representation of law enforcement.

but even though it's usually used as plural, when the representation is a bit more abstract it sometimes feels right to use a singular again?

"the police are looking into it": boots are on the ground, people are currently active.

"the police is looking into it": we've informed the police of the problem, it's in the system, people should be on the case soon. but this almost sounds a bit dismissive? like "the police" maybe isn't going to bother at all, and if you want it solved maybe go to someone who cares...

that's tricky.. and still maybe sounds a bit off, so if you want to be safe i don't think you can go wrong with plural.

The grammar police is coming!

In Germany, beer is a mass noun.

Not true. Bier has a plural (Biere) and you can count it without a unit (1 Bier, 2 Biere, etc).

Even in English it isn't consistent, ask a Canadian how much they drank and they might say "oh, I had a few beer".

Interesting one. In my ear "Biere" would only sound right when referring to distinct beer types. I think this is more a case where spoken German would prefer "3 bier bitte" but technically it should be "3 Biere". Reminds me of the old joke where you hold up two fingers and say "4 Bier fuer die Maenner vom Saegewerk".

Yeah you are right using the singular in the plural case is pretty common. But I would count it more as a colloquial/regional variation.

Duden gives "zwei Bier" as an example:

►Bier [bi:ɐ̯], das; -[e]s, -e:

alkoholisches Getränk, das aus (meist aus Gerste hergestelltem) Malz und Hopfen hergestellt wird: Bier vom Fass; ein [Glas] helles, dunkles Bier trinken; in- und ausländische Biere (Biersorten); Herr Ober, noch zwei Bier (Gläser Bier), bitte!

> In Germany, beer is a mass noun.

Did you mean "Maß" noun? :)

P.S. for non-German-speakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%9F

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