So does electricity. (And it does so exactly, whereas water contains different isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen...)
Anyway, I seem to recall seeing a Wikipedia article about some obscure language where the word for ‘water’ is grammatically plural, and thinking ‘who knows if they’ve coined a backformed singular for “water molecule”, at least informally or jocularly’.
(Note also that natural languages don’t seem to have fixed rules for whether nouns like “rice” or “oats”—i.e. collections of small objects you could count but you would never normally bother to—are mass nouns or plural nouns.)
If you’re going to insist that different isotopes disrupt the whole number quality of water, then fractional-charge quasiparticles would like a word with your allegation that electricity can be completely and exactly modeled using integers.
So does electricity. (And it does so exactly, whereas water contains different isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen...)
Anyway, I seem to recall seeing a Wikipedia article about some obscure language where the word for ‘water’ is grammatically plural, and thinking ‘who knows if they’ve coined a backformed singular for “water molecule”, at least informally or jocularly’.
(Note also that natural languages don’t seem to have fixed rules for whether nouns like “rice” or “oats”—i.e. collections of small objects you could count but you would never normally bother to—are mass nouns or plural nouns.)
If you’re going to insist that different isotopes disrupt the whole number quality of water, then fractional-charge quasiparticles would like a word with your allegation that electricity can be completely and exactly modeled using integers.
Touché.