Something else, too, and it's meted out in even less equal measure. Words.
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New devices that measure words as they are spoken, similar to the way a FitBit tracks steps, promise a way to kickstart early development.
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However, the terminological distinction between classifiers and measure words is often blurred – classifiers are commonly referred to as measure words in some contexts, such as Chinese language teaching, and measure words are sometimes called mass-classifiers or similar.
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In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun.
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Measure words play a similar role to classifiers, except that they denote a particular quantity of something (a drop, a cupful, a pint, etc.), rather than the inherent countable units associated with a count noun. Classifiers are used with count nouns; measure words can be used with mass nouns (e.g. "two pints of mud"), and can also be used when a count noun's quantity is not described in terms of its inherent countable units (e.g. "two pints of acorns").
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Shanghainese boasts numerous classifiers (also sometimes known as “counters” or “measure words”). Most classifiers in Shanghainese are used with nouns, although a small number are used with verbs.Zhu 2006, pp.71. Some classifiers are based on standard measurements or containers.
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It is not the case that every noun is only associated with one classifier. Across dialects and speakers there is great variability in the way classifiers are used for the same words, and speakers often do not agree which classifier is best.; For example, for cars some people use bù, others use tái, and still others use () liàng; Cantonese uses gaa3. Even within a single dialect or a single speaker, the same noun may take different measure words depending on the style in which the person is speaking, or on different nuances the person wants to convey (for instance, measure words can reflect the speaker's judgment of or opinion about the object).
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Chinese classifiers are also commonly called measure words, although some writers make a distinction between the two terms. In American Sign Language, particular classifier handshapes represent a noun's orientation in space. There are similarities between classifier systems and noun classes, although there are significant differences. Languages with classifiers may have up to several hundred different classifiers.
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A similar phrase used by florists is "ten stem of roses" (meaning roses on their stems). European languages naturally use measure words. These are required for counting in the case of mass nouns, and some can also be used with count nouns. For example, one can have a glass of beer, and a handful of coins.
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In some cases the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in character meaning or pronunciation over time. The English term "radical" is based on an analogy between the structure of characters and inflection of words in European languages. Radicals are also sometimes called "classifiers", but this name is more commonly applied to grammatical classifiers (measure words).
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Technically a distinction is made between classifiers (or count-classifiers), which are used only with count nouns and do not generally carry any meaning of their own, and measure words (or mass-classifiers), which can be used also with mass nouns and specify a particular quantity (such as "bottle" [of water] or "pound" [of fruit]). Less formally, however, the term "measure word" is used interchangeably with "classifier".
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After this time, other names were also proposed for classifiers: Gao Mingkai called them "noun helper words" ( zhùmíngcí), Lu Wangdao "counting markers" ( jìbiāo), and Japanese linguist Miyawaki Kennosuke called them "accompanying words" ( péibàncí). In the Draft Plan for a System of Teaching Chinese Grammar () adopted by the People's Republic of China in 1954, Lü's "measure words" ( liàngcí) was adopted as the official name for classifiers in China. This remains the most common term in use today.
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Chinese additionally differs from English in that it forms another kind of sentence by stating a topic and following it by a comment. To do this in English, speakers generally flag the topic of a sentence by prefacing it with "as for". For example: The time when something happens can be given by an explicit term such as "yesterday," by relative terms such as "formerly," etc. As in many east Asian languages, classifiers or measure words are required when using numerals, demonstratives and similar quantifiers.
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Certain restrictions or associations of particular words were often typical of certain poetic forms, and for some forms of poetry there were rules restricting or encouraging the repetition of the same word within a poem, a stanza, or a line or couplet. Sometimes a deliberately archaic or traditional poetic vocabulary was used. Often the use of common words such as pronouns and "empty words" like particles and measure words were deprecated. Certain standard vocabulary substitutions were standard where a certain word would not fit into the metrical pattern.
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The modern Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifiers or measure words. One use of classifiers is when a noun is qualified by a numeral known as a noun phrase. When a phrase such as "one person" or "three books" is translated into Chinese, it is normally necessary to insert an appropriate classifier between the numeral and the noun. For example, in Standard Mandarin,All examples given in this article are from standard Mandarin Chinese, with pronunciation indicated using the pinyin system, unless otherwise stated.
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In Burmese, classifiers or measure words, in the form of particles, are used when counting or measuring nouns. They immediately follow the number, unless the number is a round number (ends in a zero), in which case, the measure word precedes the number. Nouns to which the classifiers refer to can be omitted if the context allows, because many classifiers have implicit meanings. The only exceptions to this rule are measurements of time or age (minutes, hours, days, years, etc.), where a preceding noun is not required, as the time measurement acts as a measure word.
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The earliest modern text to discuss classifiers and their use was Ma Jianzhong's 1898 Ma's Basic Principles for Writing Clearly (). From then until the 1940s, linguists such as Ma, Wang Li, and Li Jinxi treated classifiers as just a type of noun that "expresses a quantity". Lü Shuxiang was the first to treat them as a separate category, calling them "unit words" ( dānwèicí) in his 1940s Outline of Chinese Grammar () and finally "measure words" ( liàngcí) in Grammar Studies (). He made this separation based on the fact that classifiers were semantically bleached, and that they can be used directly with a number, whereas true nouns need to have a measure word added before they can be used with a number.
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In other languages such as Hebrew, the dual exists only for words naming time spans (day, week, etc.), a few measure words, and for words that naturally come in pairs and are not used in the plural except in rhetoric: eyes, ears, and so forth. In Slovene, the use of the dual is mandatory, except for nouns that are natural pairs, such as trousers, eyes, ears, lips, hands, arms, legs, feet, kidneys, breasts, lungs, etc., for which the plural form has to be used, unless you want to stress that something is true for both one and the other part. For example, one says "oči me bolijo" (my eyes hurt), but if they want to stress that both their eyes hurt, they say "obe očesi me bolita".
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In Japanese, counter words or counters (josūshi 助数詞) are measure words used with numbers to count things, actions, and events. In Japanese, as in Chinese and Korean, numerals cannot quantify nouns by themselves (except, in certain cases, for the numbers from one to ten; see below). For example, to express the idea "two dogs" in Japanese one could say 二匹の犬 ni-hiki no inu (literally "two small-animal-count POSSESSIVE dog"), or 犬二匹 inu ni-hiki (literally "dog two small-animal-count"), but just pasting 二 and 犬 together in either order is ungrammatical. Here 二 ni is the number "two", 匹 hiki is the counter for small animals, の no is the possessive particle (a reversed "of", similar to the "'s" in "John's dog"), and 犬 inu is the word "dog".
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