Originally Posted By: dalehileman


In your example, however, there is in fact a distinction: "wheat" and "corn" are collective (?) nouns where "pea" and "potato" are not

Or am I begging the question--that is, in the classic meaning of the phrase

But thank you for that link. I am overwhelmed


"Pea" is a back-formed singular from an original collective "pease" giving us the back-formed plural "peas", for what that's worth. The difference in corn and peas isn't all that much when you think about the things themselves. Corn comes in ears and peas come in pods. You could count the grains of corn but you'd never say that you were counting corns, not in American English, anyway. You could say you were counting peas. However you could count ears of corns or pea pods or even grains of corn. Go figure.