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"A Basket of Egg" or "A Basket of Eggs"? | ||
Tags: Syntax | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5060 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 11 04 April 2015 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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I agree that regarding eggs, "basket of eggs" refers to the objects, whole eggs, and "basket of egg" refers to the
substance, the liquid that is the content of eggs. However "fruit" is a little bit of a special case. When counting fruit, one can say "one piece of fruit, two pieces of fruit, three pieces of fruit, a whole basket of fruit" rather than "one fruit, two fruits, three fruits, a whole basket of fruits." The first variety, therefore, is not considering fruit as an uncountable substance, but as objects that are counted using a counter word rather than a number and plural. Both ways of counting fruit are acceptable and have different nuances of meaning regarding whether the fruits are the typical kinds and how many kinds there are. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Alphathon Groupie Scotland Joined 4181 days ago 60 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Scottish Gaelic | Message 10 of 11 04 April 2015 at 7:04pm | IP Logged |
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That's true. I only meant to imply that both fruit and egg can be count and mass nouns, not that they were identical in usage/meaning.
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| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 11 05 April 2015 at 2:01pm | IP Logged |
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This all reminds me of Sandra Cisnero's La Casa on Mango Street. To avoid any grammatical difficulty, a man ordered ham an eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner because that's the only food he knew how to order.
To boil down the original question, "a basket of eggs" is correct for an elementary school assignment. What's in an Easter basket? Eggs. (and hopefully some candy). What's in a fruit basket? Fruit. A basket of fruit would be typical as well. A basket of fruits would imply that all the fruit in the basket in not the same. E.G. It's not a basket of apples. Even if their is a mixed basket of fruit, one could still say "a basket of fruit". The other discussions are true, but those complications aren't normally introduced in elementary school ESL. Edited by luke on 05 April 2015 at 2:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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