ABSTRACT
To refer to a certain number of items, Cantonese (like other varieties of Chinese and many Asian languages) calls for a classifier (or measure) after the number. While in English relatively few nouns have such words associated with them (for example ‘a brace of pheasants’, ‘twenty head of cattle’), in Cantonese, all nouns have such words, and they must be used, for example: yāt go yàhn 一個人 one person léuhng tìuh yú 兩條魚 two fish sei jek gáu 四隻狗 four dogs sahp tou hei 十套戲 ten films Classifiers pose two different problems:
which one to use with which noun and
when and where to use them
First, however, it is useful to distinguish some noun classifier sub-types.