Quoting John Cowan <[log in to unmask]>:

> Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> > No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's
> > hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in
> > English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an
> > entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is
> > brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you
> > probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a
> > prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing
> > ?].
>
> A good counterexample is "fist", which is a noun in the IE languages and
> Chinese (and probably lots of others) despite the obvious fact that it
> represents a certain state of the hand, and sometimes even inchoatively
> so:  "He clenched his fists" refers to the hands as fists even though
> they don't become fists until after they are clenched.  So our feeling
> for noun-ness is mere habit.

Um, on that logic, just about any everyday concrete noun is a good
counterexample - a hand, afterall, is just one out of a very strictly limited
set of configurations of mostly water and some organic compounds.

                                                               Andreas