 Classifiers did not gain official recognition as a lexical category ( part of speech ) until the 20th century . The earliest modern text to discuss classifiers and their use was Ma <unk> 's 1898 Ma 's Basic Principles for Writing Clearly ( <unk> ) . From then until the 1940s , linguists such as Ma , Wang Li , and Li <unk> treated classifiers as just a type of noun that " expresses a quantity " . Lü <unk> was the first to treat them as a separate category , calling them " unit words " ( <unk> <unk> ) in his 1940s Outline of Chinese Grammar ( <unk> ) and finally " measure words " ( 量词 liàngcí ) in Grammar Studies ( <unk> ) . He made this separation based on the fact that classifiers were semantically bleached , and that they can be used directly with a number , whereas true nouns need to have a measure word added before they can be used with a number . After this time , other names were also proposed for classifiers : Gao <unk> called them " noun helper words " ( <unk> <unk> ) , Lu <unk> " counting markers " ( <unk> <unk> ) , and Japanese linguist <unk> <unk> called them " accompanying words " ( <unk> <unk> ) . In the Draft Plan for a System of Teaching Chinese Grammar ( <unk> ) adopted by the People 's Republic of China in 1954 , Lü 's " measure words " ( 量词 liàngcí ) was adopted as the official name for classifiers in China . This remains the most common term in use today . 
