 It is from this type of structure that count-classifiers may have arisen, originally replacing the second noun (in structures where there was a noun rather than a mass-classifier) to yield Noun – Number – Classifier. That is to say, constructions like "horses five horses" may have been replaced by ones like "horses five CL", possibly for stylistic reasons such as avoiding repetition. Another reason for the appearance of count-classifiers may have been to avoid confusion or ambiguity that could have arisen from counting items using only mass-classifiers — i.e. to clarify when one is referring to a single item and when one is referring to a measure of items.
