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Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an ex

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

AndrewDucker 6y ago
It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
- andi999 6y ago
  Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
  - mkl 6y ago
    Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
      - bckr 6y ago
        This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. Well, I meant to; this is what I had in mind when I said "native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row".
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother Yes. Usually size comes first: big red metal ball. red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball. But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Pinker's written about this I know. The order looks something like this https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adjectives/ https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adj... (although there are exceptions, of course!)
      - kwhitefoot 6y ago
        Thank you!
- inkyoto 6y ago
  Pandemoniums of cockatoos are still rather common in Australia, especially considering the ruckus they bring along, and the occasional damage they cause.
wccrawford 6y ago
There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc. https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...
- ghaff 6y ago
  English uses those also to some degree: a case of beer, a carton of eggs. But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
  - mkl 6y ago
    Carton and case aren't collective nouns though. They describe the packaging. You can buy a tray of eggs or a keg or six-pack of beer.
- laurieg 6y ago
  English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
  - cowboysauce 6y ago
    I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.
  - pja 6y ago
    Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”. Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.
mkl 6y ago
Most of those collective nouns are just made up and are not used in the real world: "In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, the tendency had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild." And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/ https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/
deleted 6y ago
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laurieg 6y ago
A much closer analogue would be the words used in English together uncountable nouns: A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese. These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.

AndrewDucker 6y ago

It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).

andi999 6y ago
Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
- mkl 6y ago
  Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
    - bckr 6y ago
      This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. Well, I meant to; this is what I had in mind when I said "native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row".
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  > What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother Yes. Usually size comes first: big red metal ball. red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball. But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Pinker's written about this I know. The order looks something like this https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adjectives/ https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adj... (although there are exceptions, of course!)
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      Thank you!
inkyoto 6y ago
Pandemoniums of cockatoos are still rather common in Australia, especially considering the ruckus they bring along, and the occasional damage they cause.

wccrawford 6y ago

There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc. https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...

ghaff 6y ago
English uses those also to some degree: a case of beer, a carton of eggs. But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
- mkl 6y ago
  Carton and case aren't collective nouns though. They describe the packaging. You can buy a tray of eggs or a keg or six-pack of beer.
laurieg 6y ago
English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
- cowboysauce 6y ago
  I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.
- pja 6y ago
  Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”. Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.

mkl 6y ago

Most of those collective nouns are just made up and are not used in the real world: "In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, the tendency had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild." And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/ https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

laurieg 6y ago

A much closer analogue would be the words used in English together uncountable nouns: A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese. These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.