kurahaupo wrote: things that are not practically countable are often treated as uncountable.
That makes sense for the clearly uncountable ones like
'water', 'air', 'bread', 'sand' and 'rice' (too many grains to count)
What are some uncountable nouns that used to be countable, but with increases in volume have become impractically countable?
Besides ‘data’?
In loan words from other languages in English, there is often inconsistency with plural forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol inconsistently uses ‘chaebol’ and ‘chaebols’ as plural forms.
Chaebols were able to grow because of two factors: foreign loans and
special favors. Access to foreign technology also was critical to the
growth of the chaebol through the 1980s.
The Korea Times more consistently uses ‘chaebol’
The wikipedia article about Japanese zaibatsu (cognate with chaebol) does not have ‘zaibatsus’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
But ‘zaibatsu’ and ‘chaebols’ are not uncountable in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyeong
For English speakers in Korea, the plural form is ‘pyeong’, eg 30 pyeong
For English speakers in Taiwan, the plural form is ‘pings’, eg 40 pings
But are units of measurement countable or uncountable?
‘Five dollars isn’t a lot of money, but five million is.’
Money is countable but ‘money’ isn’t?
But according to https://www.englishgrammar101.com/module-4/verbs-agreement-and-challenges/lesson-7/agreement-money-time-and-measurements
There are only two dollars in my wallet. Replacing two dollars with it,
this, or that wouldn't make sense, so you know that the verb has to be
plural.
Probably because it is refering to the 2 banknotes.
The only European money unit whose singular and plural forms are the same is, the Italian lira, I believe.
Japanese yen, Korean won, Chinese yuan, Indian rupees, and ..
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/baht says plural is either ‘baht’ or ‘bahts’ And it says 100 ‘satang’ or ‘satangs’ is 1 baht.
Does Thai have a singular/plural distinction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension_in_Hindi says Hindi does. Chinese, Japanese and Korean don’t.