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Comment by jonnypotty | Hacker News Reader

Hey, so called 'scientists' a collection of mice is called a mischief, not a herd. This is obviously not true, glaciers are made of ice, not cheese.

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> a collection of mice is called a mischief

I always found this aspect of English, uniquely naming sets of animals, to be simultaneously adorable and thoroughly useless and anachronistic.

Is there a defence of this flock of birds, mischief of mice, whateverthefuck of whosits system? (Does it have a name?) Do all linguistic systems do it?

They’re called collective nouns, English is particularly obscure when it comes to these.

If you're interested, there's a comprehensive table of animal names with a column for the collective nouns on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_names

Some of the terms vary depending on wieght of numbers (say, more than 12) or behaviour at the time, such as migration.

I suspect these collective nouns as they are called were invented, or expanded, by the victorians, it's the kind of thing they did (if they were sufficiently wealthy).

A parliament of owls, a murder of crows etc. I can imagine it was a way of excluding people without education.

My speculation anyway. Whole things just seems silly to me.

I believe they may have grown out of “terms of venery” or words specific to hunting - an activity often divided into class-specific groupings.

I do believe you hit the nail on the head. For others who are unaware of the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_vener... - thanks

> thoroughly useless and anachronistic.

As a native English speaker, and armchair linguist, I feel that that sentence describes a rather substantial percentage of English usage, grammar, and (especially!) spelling.

English seems pretty forgiving on this, at least compared to Chinese "measure words".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers

God forbid language not be a dry dull affair.

Japanese has counter words. So you get san-mai tickets for people arriving in san-dai cars. In English that's just three tickets for people arriving in three cars. Note that 'mai' doesn't mean ticket and 'dai' doesn't mean car, it's just a counter so you also have to add in the noun in your sentence.

That seems unbelievable to me but they just go around happily saying that easily.

When you are speaking Japanese the object being counted is either easily inferred by context or placed directly in front of the number.

The "Terms of venery" section[0] of the Wikipedia page for collective nouns will probably answer some of your questions. In German, as far as I'm aware, we don't have that many different collective nouns for groups of animals (or at least they are never used outside of hunting circles). We have "Schwarm" for fish and birds, "Rudel" for pack animals, "Herde" for farm animals and most herbivores, "Schule" for whales/dolphins (and possibly some other animals). Those are the ones I can thing of off the top of my head, but there certainly must be a few more. Not eveb close to the variety in English though.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

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