I’m one of those people who cringe when someone says something like “There are less cars on the roads these days”. And if the person is talking to me, I usually correct them (“it should be ‘fewer cars’”).
But I got to thinking, why does it matter? If I say “less cars”, everyone knows what I mean. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any semantic difference between “less cars” and “fewer cars”. And on the other side, we have just the one word, “more”, that is used for both the countable and the uncountable (“more cars”, “more money”).
So my question is: Why does English have those two words in the first place? Is there, or was there ever, a difference that really warrants having one word for fewer countable nouns, and another word for less uncountable nouns?
I don’t have an answer, except to point out that it works that way in many parts of the English language. Why “I am” but “he is” and “they are”? Wouldn’t one word be sufficient here too?
In Japanese, you have to use different numbers for different kinds of things. People is one set of counting words, long thin objects is another, animals is another, paper things a whole other, etc. Languages are weird.
Multiple words which can be used for the same purposes are not uncommon; hence the concept of synonyms.
Incidentally, the “rule” that one cannot use “less” with countable nouns is simply bullshit, an urban legend which survives despite an utter lack of evidence. I’ll repost what I’ve posted a fewtimesbefore about this persistent canard:
You have been taught, through presumably no fault of your own, an appallingly widespread but absolutely incorrect fact about the rules of English. Let me quote Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage (link to the relevant portion):
A lot of examples then follow to back up the assertion that “less” used with countables remains, as it always has been, a perfectly standard usage.
So, basically, what we have here is a feature of English that has been thoroughly ordinary for more than a millenium. About two hundred years ago, some guy came along and expressed his own idiosyncratic preferences, but this never really took on with the English speaking public at large, and thus never really became a true rule of English grammar, though it ended up being codified nonetheless in an awful lot of wrongheaded usage guides, the sort which rarely bother to take a glance at reality. (Another choice quote from the excerpt: “This approach is quite common in handbooks and schoolbooks; many pedagogues seem reluctant to share the often complicated facts about English with their students.”)
Whatever the dictionary says, it still sounds wrong to many people. I don’t think this is because of undue persnicketyness, but rather because the major part of the presumably “correct” or “carefully written and spoken” English to which they have been exposed, has followed this rule. If people perceive a usage to be incorrect and say it grates on them, then we are dealing with a deeply internalized transformational rule which is legitimate, in at least some dialects, and not just a rule somebody wrote down in a grammar book. Compare “who/whom”. Everyone knows that, strictly speaking, we say “who” where it ought to be “whom”. By the book this is incorrect–but it does not grate. This is the important point.
As for why such distinctions exist in the first place, AFAIK every language has some redundant markings. The simplification of one morphological feature usually results in the introduction of new complexity. Regular verbs in English for example have lost nearly all their morphological complexity as compared with Continental languages, but at the same time came to require extensive use of the verb “to be”, which is irregular.
I have to agree with Spectre of Pithecanthropus. The only thing that Indistinguishable’s cite from Merriam-Webster shows is that there is not universal agreement on this particular rule. There are plenty of authorities that agree with the usage that I said in the OP; what makes MW the higher authority that trumps all others?
“Less cars” just sounds wrong. It sounds wrong to a lot of people. It sounds right to some people. But then, the pronunciation “nucular” for the word “nuclear” sounds right to some people, too.
And besides, I really didn’t come here for an argument about whether what I said the the OP is right or wrong. The fact remains that the two words exist, many people and authorities agree with the usage in the OP, and I was just interested in whether anyone can explain why the two words came into existence in the first place.
I understand about synonyms, but most synonyms have similar but not exact meanings, or some overlapping usages and some non-overlapping ones. So while they can be redundant in some cases, there are clearly others where having the two words makes sense.
With “less” and “fewer”, that’s kind of exactly the question I was asking: In what sense are the two words different? If what Indistinguishable cited is true, then there seems even less reason for the two words to have come into existence.
I’m wondering, for the specific case of those two words, can anyone explain why and/or how they came to be when their usages are, for all practical purposes, the same?
Sorry, Spectre, but I disagree. It is entirely an artificially learned distaste, one which people remember from time to time when it occurs to them to do so, but many violations of which pass by any native speaker’s ears entirely without attention. It couldn’t be any other way, simply because the vast majority of speech, even highly formal speech, pays no particular adherence to this rule. What evidence would it take to show you this? For example, I can demonstrate that great swaths of greatly respected writers use “less” in countable cases. Or I can even demonstrate that you yourself use “less” in countable cases. I suppose you can always keep saying “Well, they all messed up, myself included, and all these examples really would strike me as grating in typical, unaffected practice”, but this quickly becomes unconvincing.
My cite also demonstrates some of the history of those words, and the exact history of the ostensible prohibition on “less”. Would you worry so much about how both “dog” and “canine” came to be, when their usages are, for all practical purposes, the same? Or why we have “big”, “large”, “great”, “huge”, “humongous”, “gigantic”, and so on, instead of just one or two words? The same concept is often reached etymologically via many paths, particularly when it is a very common concept; it’s no surprise.
Anyway, “less” traces back to the Proto-Indo-European base *loiso-, meaning “small”, while “fewer” arises by regular grading of “few”, which itself traces back to the PIE base *pau-, also meaning “smallness”. Why two words meaning “small” (“little”, “minute”, “slight”, “wee”)? It’s just one of those things.
I’m still not convinced. The question is not whether it is learned, for all knowledge of language is learned. The question is whether the purists on this particular issue have learned it because it was drilled into them, or because it was characteristic of the corpus to which they have been exposed. I assert the latter. As a humanities major in college who then moved on to library science, I cannot remember any professor ever saying “less” in this context. The same is true of anything I was ever asked to read. Granted, my education and experience is not typical, and that of an engineering or physics student might be different. Even so, as far as I can tell, the same sort of purism prevails in computer science articles, so I am assuming that it is much the same across all disciplines.
I challenge you to bring in examples of formal discourse–scholarly papers, essays, or legal opinions for example. For example, show me where a scientist says that a certain reagent will liberate “less OH radicals” than another reagent, o an article on database technology that asserts that a particular design or hardware configuration will be able “to handle less queries”.
Also acceptable will be articles from any major newspaper, excluding the work of sports columnists and pop culture critics.
Still another option: any quote from recent fiction, where the third-person narrator is not obviously assuming a casual tone, and where the character speaking possesses at least average command of the language. Anything by John Updike would be a good start.
First of all, there’s no such thing as “absolute” in regard to the correctness of language usage rules, so just cut that out, if you please. Secondly, if a particular usage has been taught so frequently that it becomes “appallingly widespread” to the point that journalists, writers, academicians and others who employ written language professionally have adopted it as the norm then, by definition, it has become standard usage. You can quote the dictionary till you’re blue in the face, but it ain’t gonna change that basic fact of language.
And this:
Is entirely meaningless. All language preferences are entirely artificial and are based on what we’re taught as correct as well as personal experience with language use we’re familiar with. You know better than this.
Sorry, but I give this one to Indistinguishable, MWCDEU’s claim to fame is being an evidence-based handbook of English grammar. That is, it reviews English as it used in both its literary and vernacular modes, as well as the history of prescription. This goes a hell of a lot further than nebulous, anemic claims of “that which grates” among habitués of a fairly unrepresentative internet message board.
Nah, that doesn’t really work. Languages have arbitrariness, but they’re not totally arbitrary. They’re highly systematic, and you can’t just make whatever changes you want and expect them to take. Take as an example double negatives. Native speakers of English use double (and sometimes triple) negatives to intensify a negative statement. They have done since long before any of us were born. No native speakers need to be taught how to interpret double negatives.
That is, until prescriptivists invented a rule saying that double negatives were wrong because according to the rules of logic, by which no natural language has ever operated, a double negative is actually positive since two negatives make a positive. By repeating this rule, they introduced confusion and complication to the language for no real gain. Native speakers never stopped using or understanding double negatives, although the prescriptivists did manage to create doubt and uncertainty, giving normal native speakers another reason to get stressed out about reading and writing and watch TV instead.
Give this history, are we to just wake up one day and say “hey, it’s just a question of two preferences, and one’s as good as the other.” No, because one preference is an observed behavior of one aspect of a complex machine, and the other was bolted onto it by a soi-disant mechanic who knew nothing about how the machine worked. In order to make it resemble in appearance a machine he’d seen pictures of once. In a book about Ancient Rome.