God, it’s maddening. “I have several cheeses in my fridge” vs. “this is the cheese aisle of my Kroger.” I know it has something to do with countability, but there’s no way I could explain to a foreign speaker how this shit works. No one learns this “cheese: plural” vs. “cheeses: plural” shit in school, we just know it, and no one ever thinks twice about it, despite the fact that it’s incredibly subtle.
Holy fuck this is wild. It’s 100% correct English and yet I could never explain to a foreign speaker why the rules are like this. We should all reflect on the fact that we have this kind of deep, advanced, subtle, intuitive knowledge about the language that was never formally taught to us.
In “cheese aisle”, “cheese” is an attributive noun or noun adjunct, a noun that is used as an adjective. These are usually singular but, as is the norm in English, there are exceptions.
Everyone says that until you ask why they don’t talk like Beowulf. And no-one can ever explain why ‘more’ is fine for both when the amount is increasing.
It’s not rigorous at all, but it’s much more convincing to the genuinely perplexed. They won’t understand whatever proof you might deploy, but “How do you represent one third in decimals?” may result in a breakthrough, ime.
It’s a pretty common pattern in English, and I assume other languages too. If you have a mass noun that refers to a thing (“I ate some cheese,” “I gave my toddler some medicine”), you can convert it into a count noun that refers to varieties of the thing (“A properly constructed cheese plate has at least three cheeses,” “My grandmother takes five medicines every day!”). It’s basically just an shorthand where you say “2 Xs” rather than “2 kinds of X.”