The use of so-called classifier particles with nouns is a widespread areal feature of eastern Asia. By "areal", linguists mean that a feature is not confined to a single language family, but rather seems to spread between languages due to geographic contact. In the case of noun classifiers, the phenomenon almost certainly started in Chinese, and spread to Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and many other languages, by a process of cultural diffusion. (These languages mostly belong to entirely separate language families; if any of them are descended from a common ancestor, that connection is much older than the comparatively recent spread of noun classifiers.) Although the details differ from language to language, the overall features are quite similar. The universe of nouns is divided up, very unevenly, into between a dozen and a hundred categories. Each category is identified by a classifier word, also called a measure word. Classifiers are used with words like "this", "that", and numerals. In other contexts, classifiers are forbidden. In Mandarin, for example, one must use the classifier in phrases like "this book" or "seven books", but in "my book" or "they sell books", the classifier does not appear. Typically, a particular classifier governs a set of nouns with some obvious semantic similarity, such as shape. Some classifiers are specific to a single noun; there is often (as in Mandarin) a catch-all classifier which can be used in a pinch with any noun. Kids and foreigners tend to use these more general classifiers; use of the 'correct' classifier is a mark of fluency and education. Many assignments of classifiers to nouns make as little sense as the gender assignments of nouns in European languages. In a few other parts of the world, other languages display phenomena like East Asian classifiers, but with key differences. Some indigenous languages of North Australia have thirty or forty 'genders', each with its own set of singular and plural articles. In the Americas, the Athabaskan languages have different verbs of handling for different categories of object, so that "I am carrying the rock" and "I am carrying the basket" use different verbs. This division of the world into many categories of noun is quite different from the accusative/partitive distinction in Finnish and Estonian that Helgar Lipmaa describes. Even Early Modern English shows that distinction, using 'of' where Finnish and Estonian would use the partitive, as in "He ate of the bread". -A