Nouns

I happened to read an interesting article the other day. It was about “Number”.

That article says, “Number isn’t important in the Japanese language, whereas in English, it’s crucial. We are always thinking about how many, or does it actually exist or not. And this is absolutely central to the language.”



Surely, I think we don’t care that nouns can be counted or not. Nouns don’t have any inflections for number in Japanese language. We describe the number only when we really need that. The writer also mentions its existence. He says that the information of that a noun is a countable noun or an uncountable noun is as important as its meaning. He defines a countable noun. “Whether you can conceive of something as being, you know, sitting there with a --- it has a beginning and an end. And it serves as the unit for itself.”



This would end up being philosophical problem, wouldn’t it? This could show the different ways of thinking between people who speak English and people who speak Japanese. We don’t pay attention to the number of things. I would say that the reason is that we always think of a noun as an abstract concept.