Chinese calls those qualifiers or quantifiers, but they don’t even match the Japanese ones it seems, which is funny.
Like 一本书，两位人 and so on. Yet, you can default to the generic one which is 个 (even if it might not sound very proper or educated, it’s not wrong per say).
All languages have redundancy; it serves as a form of forward error correction. I recall some sort of study (sorry, no link) finding that information density was (by some metric) similar across different languages. So it's not just inefficiency; it's part of the language's necessary inefficiency.
Of course, some forms of redundancy would be better than others--in cases where people aren't sure which particle to use, it probably isn't doing much good. However, language evolution is able to achieve some optimizations, and I suspect the particles people know tend to be the most important. For example, the many sushi or shellfish particles might sound particularly silly, but if you're in those industries, maybe they are helpful in maintaining important distinctions in a noisy kitchen/market, or in written records. If you're a customer you probably don't know them, and you don't need to.
Epistemic status: Wild-ass guessing from my armchair.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] thread素晴らしい着眼点ですね。気付きに感謝します！
You could say "The printer needs 4 papers", but that sounds odd. Adding "4 sheets of paper" is roughly equivalent to Japanese counters.
The Book of Saint Albans being a prime example of this
Like 一本书，两位人 and so on. Yet, you can default to the generic one which is 个 (even if it might not sound very proper or educated, it’s not wrong per say).
You're right on the Chinese bit, just wanted to alert you that per se is from Latin by/in itself. It has nothing to do with to say.
TIL :)
Of course, some forms of redundancy would be better than others--in cases where people aren't sure which particle to use, it probably isn't doing much good. However, language evolution is able to achieve some optimizations, and I suspect the particles people know tend to be the most important. For example, the many sushi or shellfish particles might sound particularly silly, but if you're in those industries, maybe they are helpful in maintaining important distinctions in a noisy kitchen/market, or in written records. If you're a customer you probably don't know them, and you don't need to.
Epistemic status: Wild-ass guessing from my armchair.