The old song asks:
Oats, peas, beans and barley grow,
Oats, peas, beans and barley grow,
Can you or I or anyone know
Why oats, peas, beans and barley grow?
But which of these four foodstuffs is the odd one out linguistically?
One of the many illogicalities of language is the comparison of countable and uncountable nouns. When this distinction is explained to students they are often surprised to learn that money is uncountable. Euros, pounds, dollars etc. can be counted (i.e. have plural forms) but the word money itself is an uncountable (or mass) noun – except in Russian (and maybe other Slavonic languages), where the word den’gi is plural; in fact it is what is known as a plurale tantum, a noun that is always used in the plural, trousers or remains for example in English.
This phenomenon is particularly noticeable in the names of cereals and pulses – and even there we can note that cereal is countable while corn is not, although in British English they are more or less synonyms. According to the COED corn is:
‘chiefly Brit. the chief cereal crop of a district, especially (in England) wheat or (in Scotland) oats. informal the grain of any cereal, especially as fed to livestock. N. Amer. & Austral./NZ maize.’
The non-British definition of corn specifically as maize is the reason why we talk of corn flakes and popcorn, which are made from maize.
Corn, barley, maize, rice, rye, soya and wheat are uncountable, while cereals, peas, beans, lentils and oats are countable (oats is a plurale tantum; the word that has singular and plural forms is oatflake(s)). There is no clear rule here, especially if we consider the strange case of the word peas. According to the OED, in Middle English the word was sing. pēse, pl. pēsen. In the sixteenth century an <a> was added to make sing. pease, pl. peasen, peses, or peas. As the plural form was reduced to pease, the same as the singular, in about 1600 the back-formation pea was assumed as the separate singular form. The word pease now survives only in the name of the dish pease pudding (split peas boiled with other vegetables in a pudding).
The word pasta is uncountable in English, as are the names of individual types of pasta (spaghetti, cannelloni, etc.), although these names are Italian plural forms.
For barley as a truce word, click here.
