Another quick word-nerd post

Still no time for a longer update, but this is a fun thing about German I'd like to share.

In English there is an important grammatical distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. You can have two fish, but you can't have two informations or two flours*. In German, both of these latter two are countable, and in Japanese I think all nouns are grammatically countable, so speakers of those languages often make the mistake of saying "thank you for the informations."

What I find fascinating is that whereas in English, there are words that can never be plural (you say "pieces of information"), in German there are words that can never be singular (there are also uncountables in German, like Wasser, "water"). The word for "parents" in German is Eltern, and it is always plural. If you want to say "one parent" you have to say Elternteil, which literally means "parents-piece." It's not that the singular of Eltern doesn't get used, it simply doesn't exist in the language.

What's been getting me all day today is the German word Software, which was stolen from English. In German you can say "a software," "eine Software". You would think that you would then be able to refer to "two softwares" or "many softwares", but you can't. If you have one Software it's countable, but as soon as you have more than one it becomes uncountable, and you have to say something like zwei Softwareprodukte (two software-products) or some such. So in the singular, Software is a countable noun, but when discussing unquantified numbers it's an uncountable noun.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the marvel of logic and consistency that is the German language.

*Okay, for the smart-ass linguists out there about to correct me, you could say something like "choosing between flours when baking bread is a difficult task." But that's different.