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feat: Flag indefinite article used before mass nouns (uncountable nouns) #386

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hippietrail opened this issue Jan 15, 2025 · 1 comment

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@hippietrail
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hippietrail commented Jan 15, 2025

Non-native English speakers from all cultures have trouble with mass nouns / uncountable nouns / non-count nouns in English. A little of this may have started to spill over into younger native speakers:

  • An advice
  • An evidence
  • An info/an information
  • An infrastructure
  • A luggage

Erroneous pluralizations of these seem to all already be flagged by the spellchecker.
Suggestions could include:

  • Simply removing the article
  • Change a/an into "some"
  • Add a quantifier, usually "item of" or "piece of", but some words have one or more idiomatic ones.
  • Some of these have one or more other countable nouns with the same meaning that could be suggested: "an advice" -> "a tip", "a suggestion".
@hippietrail
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hippietrail commented Jan 22, 2025

A couple of these have become more acceptable in the programming context, so I suppose they should be optional. They sound wrong to people my age and older who are native speakers, but sound fine to non-native speakers and younger native speakers. I'm not sure if it crossed over in or after the Millennial generation:

  • I wrote a code → I wrote some code
  • This is a software → This is a software package

There are probably word-specific replacements. I'll start a list for each:

code / source code

  • an app
  • a piece of code
  • a program
  • a snippet
  • a snippet of code
  • some code
  • code

software

  • a piece of software
  • an app
  • a program
  • a software tool
  • a software package
  • some software
  • software
  • a tool

"Hardware" may fall into the same category. I'll add it if I find concrete examples in the wild. "Firmware" seems to be different in some way and at least has a plural though "I installed a firmware." still sounds wrong where "They're running different firmwares." sounds more acceptable, possibly not 100% acceptable though.

@hippietrail hippietrail changed the title Flag indefinite article used before mass nouns (uncountable nouns) feat: Flag indefinite article used before mass nouns (uncountable nouns) Jan 31, 2025
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