Why are some nouns both countable and uncountable? 1 pizza, 2 pizzas, but you can tell your friend that they bought too much pizza. Or tell your overzealous birthday planner who bought 5 cakes that it’s entirely too much cake for one person to eat. And after a long day of fishing, you tell your proud child that the 20 fish she caught is a whole bunch of fish.
I’m at a loss to explain this, and enquiring minds of Japanese children want to know.
I note they’re all foodstuffs – you can’t have too much book, for instance.
Not all foods work though – you can’t have too much peach or too much marshmallows, too much sandwich.
Hm.
Maybe foodstuffs that come in larger units and are then divided into servings?
Hm, you may be on to something there. Like lasagna and casserole both work for that. I wonder if there’s something small to disprove it.
The other usage is with “more” – when offering seconds, you’d say “would you like more X?” So perhaps it is about non-pre-determined serving side – if you want more cake, you can then specify a lot more (big piece) or a little more (small piece).
You could. In a ceremony involving bell, book and candle for example, one could say that there was too much book, not enough candle.
Well you can have too much peach or too much marshmallow, in some contexts.
For example, if I’m experimenting with a new pie recipe, and I ask you to taste it, it would be quite acceptable for you to tell me that I added too much peach or too much marshmallow.
I think this gives us a hint about what’s going on. If we are referring to the individual items then it’s “too many”. If we are referring strictly to the quantity then it becomes “too much”. And it seems it can be applied in all circumstances to all objects, provided you are talking about quantity and not number of units.
But it seems that in those cases, the original quantity is uncertain. Like in the pie, there may be too much peach, but it’s all mushed together. You wouldn’t look at 5 peaches on a table and say that there’s a lot of peach, but you could do that for cake.
You can have three hairs in your sink but wish you had more hair.
I can read two films from an x-ray machine and then need to buy more film.
I trimmed four stray threads off my pants but my wife needs to buy more thread.
Native English speakers know that there are no rules, only suggestions. 
It seems that is because the amount *is * uncertain. A cake isn’t a defined size. So while 12 cupcakes may not be enough cake, 2 wedding cakes may be too much. Hence “too much cake” rather than “too many cakes”.
In contrast, you wouldn’t refer to “too much cookie” or even “too much cupcake” on the table, despite those things being identical to cake for most purposes. That seems to be because both of those things come in fairly standard sizes, so “too many” = “too much”. If 12 cookies are not enough then it’s unlikely that there would ever be a situation where 2 are too many.
And conversely, while you wouldn’t say that there’s a lot of peach, if there were fruits of various types you would indeed say that there is too much fruit, rather than to many fruits. Once again, it appears that this is because two watermelons may be too much fruit, whereas two cherries is not enough. So saying thatthere are too many fruits isn’t actually accurate, whereas to much fruit is. It;s the volume of fruit you are referring to, not the numbers of individual items.
Hm, that makes sense. If you saw a peach the size of a basketball, you could say that it’s a lot of peach.
Crap, all of this is making me less and less confident of my ability to communicate it to foriegn high school students. Who don’t even really care much in the first place. Sigh…
Yeah, nobody gives two shits about all this shit…
I’m so not teaching them how to identify how many shits are in a collective shit.
No need to get shitty.
In the cases cited, it may be how they are countable.
If you use five peaches instead of four, you may decide that you used too many peaches. If you used 3/4 of a gallon can of peach puree, you may say too much peach (puree). So there’s also a dropped word involved.
I would think that 12 cupcakes would be too many or two few, depending on if you had 11 or 13 eaters. But never too “much cupcake” or too “less cupcake.”
We say 1 doe, 1 fawn, 1 buck, and 2 does, 2 fawns, and 2 bucks. But “a deer,” “many deer.” Never “much deer.” “Fewer deer,” never “less deer.”
I’m certainly sure this doesn’t cover all the situations. But it’s a start. Tell your students that if quantities are individually countable–“One gallon of gas,” “few (or many) gallons of gas,” but when you’re not counting units it’s “more gas” or “less gas.”
In one the unit (gallons/gallon) is the plural/singular, but when it’s a comparative volume then the other noun, “gas” is the deal, and it doesn’t change.
And remember as important a linguist as William Safire thought his greatest victory was getting a supermarket chain to change their signs from “15 items or less” to “15 items or fewer.”
I think you’re conflating nouns with irregular plurals and countable/uncountable nouns. You can still count 1 deer, 2 deer (or sheep or fish [except for the fishes when you have various species of fish together]), despite the fact that the plural form doesn’t use an s.
I’m still struggling with explaining why you can count 2 fish (or cakes, to avoid the irr. plural issue), but still be able to refer to all of it together as some fish (or cake).
Still trying to think of a standard-sized example for Blake that can be both.
Well, consider the time difference!
Frankly, there are parts of English usage that go back more than 5 centuries, have been accepted since that time, and may or may not change.
There are times when I’ve taught and the kids asked good, logical questions, and there were no logical answers.
In your case, you might be able to ask if they knew any such inconsistancies in Japanese. It might teach them that all of our cultures have idiosyncracies.
You’ve presumably had to explain the difficulties of English spelling, so I can’t imagine this is a new thing. I admire your hope that there is some sort of systemic explanation. Probably not, methinks.
You can never have too much bacon!
Actually, that’s an odd word. While in other contexts you can use it in the plural (the cloning machine went haywire, now Hollywood is being overrun by Bacons!), when talking about the foodstuff the quantity is always defined by the words preceding it. A slab o’ bacon. A mess o’ bacon. A ridiculous quantity of bacon. No bacon. A piece of bacon. Bacon bits.
It’s not an irregular word like sheep, because you can still have a sheep or seven sheep, but you can’t have a bacon or seven bacon.
It can’t be unique, but how unusual is this? Is there a term for it?
Isn’t it just an uncountable noun? Like meat? You can have a slab of meat, but you can’t count up to 10 meats. Now The Count is sad because he wants meat and he can only eat things he counts, and his head is too filled with someone’s hand to remember that he can count steak.
This one isn’t hard. You can have lots of bacon or not much bacon.
But you can’t have lots of rashers of bacon, or not much slices of bacon.
Again, it’s what’s countable. Rashers, slabs, slices, sides, bits, even servings.
But there is an amorphous amount of just bacon in any form, which can be too much or too little, more, or less.
I went out hunting last weekend. We saw a lot of bear spoor, but not much deer spoor. That may explain why we ended up with ** less deer** than bear at the end of the hunt.
Don’t think so. In the first instance, “much” is modifying the noun “spoor”, not the (pseudo?) adjective “deer.” In the second instance, “much” is modifying the unspoken noun “meat.”