Proper and common nouns 2. What is a proper name? Own names: examples

Nouns are divided into proper and common nouns according to their meaning. The very definitions of this part of speech have Old Slavonic roots.

The term "common" comes from "reprimand", "reproach", and is used for the general name of homogeneous, similar objects and phenomena, and "own" means "feature", an individual person or a single object. This naming distinguishes it from other objects of the same type.

For example, the common word "river" defines all rivers, but the Dnieper, Yenisei are proper names. These are constant grammatical features of nouns.

What are proper names in Russian

A proper name is an exclusive name for an object, phenomenon, person, different from others, standing out from other multiple concepts.

These are the names and nicknames of people, the names of countries, cities, rivers, seas, astronomical objects, historical events, holidays, books and magazines, animal names.

Also, ships, enterprises, various institutions, product brands and much more that require a special name can have their own names. May consist of one or more words.

Spelling is determined by the following rule: all proper names are capitalized. For example: Vanya, Morozko, Moscow, Volga, Kremlin, Russia, Russia, Christmas, Battle of Kulikovo.

Names that have a conditional or symbolic meaning are enclosed in quotation marks. These are the names of books and various publications, organizations, firms, events, etc.

Compare: Big theater, but the Sovremennik theater, the Don River and the Quiet Don novel, the play Thunderstorm, the Pravda newspaper, the Admiral Nakhimov motor ship, the Lokomotiv stadium, the Bolshevichka factory, the Mikhailovskoye Museum-Reserve.

Note: the same words, depending on the context, are common or proper and are written according to the rules. Compare: bright sun and star Sun, native earth and planet Earth.

Proper names, consisting of several words and denoting a single concept, are underlined as one member of the sentence.

Let's look at an example: Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov wrote a poem that made him famous. So, in this sentence, the subject will be three words (first name, patronymic and last name).

Types and examples of proper nouns

Proper names are studied by the linguistic science of onomastics. This term is derived from the ancient Greek word and means "the art of giving names"

This area of linguistics deals with the study of information about the name of a specific, individual object and identifies several types of names.

Anthroponyms are called proper names and surnames of historical figures, folklore or literary characters, famous and ordinary people, their nicknames or pseudonyms. For example: Abram Petrovich Hannibal, Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, Lefty, Judas, Koschey the Immortal.

Toponyms study the appearance of geographical names, names of cities, streets, which may reflect the specifics of the landscape, historical events, religious motifs, lexical features of the indigenous population, and economic signs. For example: Rostov-on-Don, Kulikovo field, Sergiev Posad, Magnitogorsk, Strait of Magellan, Yaroslavl, Black Sea, Volkhonka, Red Square, etc.

Astronyms and cosmonyms analyze the appearance of the names of celestial bodies, constellations, galaxies. Examples: Earth, Mars, Venus, Halley's Comet, Stozhary, Ursa Major, Milky Way.

There are other sections in onomastics that study the names of deities and mythological heroes, the names of nationalities, the names of animals, etc., helping to understand their origin.

Common noun - what is it

These nouns name any concept from a set of similar ones. They have a lexical meaning, that is, informativeness, in contrast to proper names, which do not have such a property and only name, but do not express the concept, do not reveal its properties.

The name doesn't tell us anything Sasha, it only identifies a particular person. In the phrase girl Sasha, we learn the age and gender.

Common noun examples

Common names are all the realities of the world around us. These are words expressing specific concepts: people, animals, natural phenomena, objects, etc.

Examples: doctor, student, dog, sparrow, thunderstorm, tree, bus, cactus.

Can denote abstract entities, qualities, states or characteristics:courage, understanding, fear, danger, peace, power.

How to define a proper or common noun

A common noun can be distinguished by meaning, because it names an object or phenomenon related to homogeneous, and a grammatical feature, because it can change by numbers ( year - years, man - people, cat - cats).

But many nouns (collective, abstract, real) do not have a plural form ( childhood, darkness, oil, inspiration) or the only one ( frosts, weekdays, darkness). Common nouns are written with a small letter.

Proper nouns are the distinctive name of single objects. They can only be used in the singular or plural ( Moscow, Cheryomushki, Baikal, Catherine II).

But if they call different persons or objects, they can be used in the plural ( Ivanov family, both Americas). Capitalized, enclosed in quotation marks if necessary.

Its useful to note: between proper and common names there is a constant exchange, they tend to move into the opposite category. common words Faith Hope Love became proper names in Russian.

Many borrowed names were also originally common nouns. For example, Peter - "stone" (Greek), Victor - "winner" (Lat.), Sophia - "wisdom" (Greek).

Often in history, proper names become common nouns: bully (English Houlihan family with a bad reputation), volt (physicist Alessandro Volta), colt (inventor Samuel Colt). Literary characters can acquire a common noun: donquixote, Judas, plushkin.

Toponyms have given names to many objects. For example: cashmere fabric (Kashmir Valley of Hindustan), cognac (province in France). At the same time, an animate proper name becomes an inanimate common noun.

And vice versa, it happens that generic concepts become uncommon: Lefty, cat Fluff, signor Tomato.

From school time, we remember how a proper name differs from a common noun: the first is written with a capital letter! Masha, Rostov, Leo Tolstoy, Polkan, Danube - compare with a girl, city, count, dog, river. And only this? Perhaps, to figure it out, you will need the help of Rosenthal.

Proper name- a noun indicating a specific object, person, animal, object in order to distinguish them from a number of homogeneous

Common noun- a noun that names a class, type, category of an object, action or state, not taking into account their individuality.

These categories of nouns are usually studied in the 5th grade, and schoolchildren remember once and for all that the difference between a proper name and a common noun is in an uppercase or lowercase letter at the beginning. For the majority, it is enough to understand that names, surnames, nicknames, names of topographic and astronomical objects, unique phenomena, as well as objects and objects of culture (including literary works) belong to their own. All the rest are common nouns, and there are much more of the latter.

Comparison

Proper names are always secondary and secondary, and not every object or object requires their presence. For example, naming natural phenomena, with the exception of typhoons and hurricanes of enormous destructive power, is not accepted and is useless. You can describe, concretize your instructions in different ways. So, speaking about a neighbor, you can give his name, or you can give a description: a teacher, in a red jacket, lives in apartment number 7, an athlete. It becomes clear what we are talking about. However, only proper nouns can uniquely define individuality (there can be many teachers and athletes nearby, but Arkady Petrovich is alone), and their relationship with the object is closer. Common nouns denote concepts or categories.

Proper names are most often random, not connected in any way with the characteristics of the object, and if they are related (Slyuk's cat, Bystrinka river), then it is very ambiguous: both a cat can turn out to be good-natured, and a river can be slow-flowing. Common nouns name and describe the subject, these nouns necessarily carry lexical information.

Only animate and inanimate objects that have significance for a person and need a personal approach are called proper names. So, an average person sees stars at night, and an amateur astronomer, for example, sees the constellation Taurus; for the Minister of Education, schoolchildren are just schoolchildren, and for the class teacher 3 "B" - Vasya Petrov, Petya Vasechkin, Masha Startseva.

We have already determined what is the difference between a proper name and a common noun in terms of semantics. Grammatically, they can be distinguished using the plural form: the first ones are not used in such a form (Moscow, Lev Nikolaevich, dog Sharik). An exception is made for geographical names that do not have a singular number (Velikie Luki), as well as in the case of combining persons by kinship or belonging to a homogeneous group (the Karamazov brothers; all Peters are now birthdays; there are many Ivanovkas in Russia).

When processing foreign texts, proper names are not translated, they are written either in practical transcription (preserving phonetics and as close as possible to the original), or in transliteration (the word is transferred character by character in accordance with international rules).

And, of course, lowercase letters for common nouns, uppercase letters for proper nouns. Have we already talked about this?

a word or phrase intended to name a specific, well-defined object or phenomenon, distinguishing this object or phenomenon from a number of objects or phenomena of the same type
it can be a geographical name, names of celestial bodies, periodicals, a person's name, surname, etc.

Own (actual name) - names, names, nicknames of animals - are written with a capital letter: Moscow, Russia, Volga, planet Earth, Sharik and Matroskin, Dobrynya Nikitich. Common noun - what is called to determine an object or action, is written with a small letter - rain, city, railway, ps, river, girl, dad.

A proper name is a noun expressed by a word or phrase that names a specific object or phenomenon. In contrast to the common noun, denoting a whole class of objects or phenomena at once, a proper name is intended for one, well-defined object of this class. For example, a book is a common noun, while War and Peace is a proper noun. The word river is a common noun, but Amur is a proper name. Names of people, surnames, patronymics, titles of books, songs, films, geographical names can be proper names. Proper names are capitalized. Some types of proper names require quotation marks. This applies to literary works (Eugene Onegin), paintings (Mona Lisa), films (only old men go to battle), theaters (Variety shows), and other types of nouns. When translating proper names into other languages, transcription and transliteration methods are used: Gogolya-street (Gogol street), radio Mayak (radio Mayak). In English, proper nouns are not specially marked with quotation marks. Proper names and common nouns are not separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. Proper names can turn into common nouns, and vice versa. For example, the word avatar was only a household name until the movie Avatar was made. Now this word, depending on the context, plays the role of a common noun or proper noun. Schumacher is the surname of a certain racing driver, but gradually all lovers of fast driving began to be called Schumachers. Trademarks that are unique producers of a certain type of goods or simply monopolists can pass into common nouns from proper names. A striking example is the company Xerox, which produces electrophotographic copiers. This company exists to this day, but now all photocopiers are called copiers in general.

Denoting the name (common name) of a whole class of objects and phenomena that have a certain common set of features, and naming objects or phenomena according to their belonging to such a class. Common nouns are signs of linguistic concepts and are opposed to proper names. The transition of common nouns to proper names is accompanied by the loss of a linguistic concept by the name (for example, "Gum" from "gum" - "right"). Common nouns are concrete (table), abstract or abstract (love), real or material (sugar), and collective (students).

A noun designates a representation or concept on its own, regardless of any relationship to other representations with which it may be associated. A noun can denote both an object, a quality or a property, and an action. Its difference from the verb and adjective lies not in the real meaning, but in way expressions for this value. If we compare, for example, the adjective " white" and the verb " turns white» with a noun « white”, we will see that all three words denote a representation of quality; but adjective ( white) expresses it, while pointing to some object that has this quality, and the verb ( turns white), moreover, depicts this quality in its occurrence, while the noun ( white) has no such side values. There are many other nouns denoting actions, for example " burning, melting, movement, withdrawal, import, exit". The difference between their meaning and the meaning of the corresponding verbs is the same as in the above example. In Indo-European languages, the category of grammatical gender has also developed in the noun: each noun must necessarily be either masculine, or feminine, or neuter. Nouns in Indo-European languages are formed from roots with numerous suffixes. These suffixes usually express special shades of the meaning of nouns, which can be divided according to them into several categories:

Names actors(nomina agentium), the most important suffix of which is * - ter: Skt. d â -tar-, Greek δω - τήρ, Latin da-tor, Church Slavonic yes-tel.
Names guns(instrumenti) having the same suffixes with
names places(loci);
Nouns collective(collective)
diminutives
Names action(n. actionis), formed by very diverse suffixes, of which the forms forming the indefinite mood and supin deserve special attention - forms that have joined the system of verb forms.

There are also nouns in Indo-European languages that coincide in their basis with the root without any suffix. The category of a noun, like all grammatical categories, is not stable (cf. Syntax): we often observe both the transition of a noun to another category, and the transformation of other parts of speech into a noun (for the latter, see Substantiation; on the creation of the category of the indefinite inclinations - see Inclination). The boundary between noun and adjective is especially fluid. As adjectives could turn into nouns in various ways, and vice versa, nouns often turned into adjectives. The use of a noun as an application already brings it closer to an adjective. Since a noun can also denote a quality, the transition to an adjective is facilitated from this side as well. In some languages, nouns can also form degrees of comparison (see also Comparative). Initially, there was no formal distinction between nouns and adjectives: noun declension is no different from adjective declension in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Thus, such phrases as the Latin exercitus victor "victorious army" (sob. "army-winner"), bos orator "draft ox" (sob. "ox-plowman"), etc. could easily arise. In the same way in Indo-European languages, complex adjectives were formed from nouns, for example, the Greek ροδοδάκτυλος “rosy-fingered” (prop. “pink finger”) or Latin magnanimus “generous” (prop. “great spirit”), German barfuss “barefoot” (prop. “bare foot” ), Church Slavonic chrnovlas “black-haired” (prop. “black hair”), etc. Psychologically, such a transformation of a noun into an adjective should be accompanied by the fact that the real meaning of the noun is thought of as something inherent in another object - and this process in the formation of words is generally very common . Especially often it can be observed in the formation of nicknames, when a person is called, for example, “wolf”, “biryuk” and even “bright buttons” (as Akim calls the officer in “The Power of Darkness”).