4 ms·
It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) inc
by alex-g 14y ago
It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not lots of kinds of grains), sand, snow, etc. They are not inflected for the plural and do not take numbers - we say "three grains of sand" not "three sands". It's plausible for Lego to work the same way - so "ten pieces of lego", not "ten legos".
Perhaps in these oft-cited days of lego sets that are more like a few big pieces than lots of little pieces, people will start to think differently.
- Swizec 14y ago"three sands" sounds like something Clarkson would say ... I think, his image immediately flashed in my mind when reading that.
- Timmmmbob 14y agoExactly. In English "Lego" is a mass noun, like water and sand. We say "a piece of lego" or "a lego piece" to identify a single brick. I guess in American they don't treat it as a mass noun, and maybe they say "a lego" instead of "a piece of lego".