The Partitive Case

1.              Countable and Uncountable

My students use less when English wants them to use fewer. One of them writes: If you give less presents, they had better be good. The traditional rule, by which I mean the one that I was taught, is that with countable nouns, like presents and sandwiches, you use fewer, not less: If you give fewer presents, they had better be good. Use less with uncountable nouns, like milk, ash, and love: Put less milk in the tea.

But it’s not so simple. Language is both countable (I speak one language well, three badly) and uncountable—language surrounds us every day—like water. And English ebbs and flows, leaving strands of seaweed, shells, mysterious pittings on the uncountable sand. Fewer is being left on the shore, unnecessary to the ocean.

2.         Uncountable Milk

Milk is uncountable—Less milk in the tea, please—but can be divided into countable quantities: tablespoons, glasses, cartons, those six-gallon bags that go into cafeteria milk dispensers. The kitchen manager orders fewer of them as fewer children drink milk.

The Finnic languages, like Finnish and Estonian, use the partitive case for nouns when they identify a portion of something. So to describe milk in general, you use the nominative case, maito: milk is good, milk is a white liquid, milk comes from cows. If you want to ask for a glass of milk, or some milk, or milk with your tea, you must use the partitive case and ask for maitoa. My Finnish friend explained: “As if it were a portion of all the milk in the world.” Which, of course, it is, though English does not say so.

3.         Ash, Ashes

My students sometimes can’t tell if a word is singular or plural. They are impatient with a word like ash, which might mean pounds of ash accumulating in a cold fireplace, or ashes, which could mean the same thing. 

Nominative case: Ash is (or ashes are) gray, white, and black.  

Partitive case: A handful, a heap, a box of ashes. Or: a speck of ash. Or in places where English would use some or any: do you have some of the ashes?  

Or for negative statements: There are no ashes.  

Or for “tentative inquiries”: Will we scatter the ashes? Or for actions which are ongoing and without end: I keep the ashes on a shelf.

4.         Love

Nominative case: All you need is love. (Finnish syntax turns this phrase around, the way the Beatles did: Love is all you need.)

Partitive case: Almost anything is just a portion of all of that thing in the world. A pile of presents. An armful of logs. A handful of ashes. Not a person, though. A person is a person. Whether he was one of a thousand people, a hundred thousand people, a million people, or all the people in the world, this is true: he was a quantity in himself, not a portion of it.