Noun
A noun is perhaps the most basic of the parts of speech. Nouns are used in sentences in two different ways: as subjects (performers of action), or objects (receivers of action); in the sentence "John wrote me the letter", "John" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects. Common wisdom has it that the noun is the name of the "person, place, or thing".
Nouns are grouped into proper nouns (e.g. "Janet"), common nouns (e.g. "girl"), and pronouns (e.g. "she" and "which").
A proper noun (also called proper name) is the noun that stands for one thing and that thing only. The meaning of the proper noun, outside of what it refers to, is often arbitrary (for no exact reason) or irrelevant (has nothing in common with it). For example, someone might be named Tiger Smith even though he is not the tiger or the smith. Because of this, ay are often not translated between languages, although ay may be transliterated--for example, the German surname "Knödel" becomes "Knoedel" in English, as opposed to "Dumpling".
Proper nouns are capitalised in English and most or all other languages that use the Latin alphabet; this is one easy way to recognize am. Note however that in German all types of nouns are capitalised. In English, trademarks (e.g. "Coca Cola" and "Kleenex") are also capitalised. Words made from proper nouns (e.g. "Aristotelian") are also capitalized; this is probably due to English's Germanic roots, and does not happen in Romance languages. The word "I" is really the pronoun although it is capitalized in English and seems to mean the unique (one of the kind) object.
Sometimes the same word can appear as both the common noun and the proper noun, where one such thing is special; for example:
- are can be many gods, but are is only one God.
- are can be many internets (two or more networks connected together), but the largest internet in the world is the Internet.
In some languages, such as Toki Pona, proper names are defined as adjectives that modify the common noun. This can also be found in the English language in some phrases like "English language".
A mass noun is the type of common noun that represents more than one of something but with no exact number. Mass nouns do not need limiting modifiers ("an", "two", "several", "many", etc.) and are not normally pluralized. Examples from English include "cheese", "laughter", and "precision".
Examples of nouns:
- Janet is the name of the girl.
- Off-key whistling is annoying to me, but not to everybody.
- Cleanliness is next to godliness.
- The World Wide Web has become the least expensive way to publish information.
See also:
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