Noumenon

“ Examine the construction of the italicized nouns in the following sentences:—
1. Subject nominative. The noun may be used as the subject of a verb; as, Boys play. The subject of a verb is in the nominative case.
2. Predicate nominative. A noun that is used to form a complete predicate, and refers to the same person or thing as the subject, is in the nominative case after the verb; as, John became king. A noun so used is called a predicate noun or predicate nominative. The verbs be, seem, become, appear, look are followed by a predicate nominative. ”

“ Noun,” said Serjeant Parsing, “you do claim a big share of words. You will be making out that the names of persons belong to you next.”
11 “So they do,” replied Mr. Noun; “no matter who the persons are, their names belong to me. I have the name of every person in the world from good Queen Victoria on her throne to the raggedest beggar-boy in the street. There is not a child in Schoolroom-shire whose name is not a noun. And I have not the names of people only, but of all pet dogs, cats, birds, horses, or rabbits: Fido, Tabby, Bright-eye, Tiny, Shag, and any other pet names you can think of. ”

“ As no action can be produced without some agent or moving cause, it follows, that every active verb must have some actor or agent. This actor, doer, or producer of the action, is the nominative. Nominative, from the Latin nomino, literally signifies to name; but in the technical sense in which it is used in grammar, it means the noun or pronoun which is the subject of affirmation. This subject or nominative may be active, passive, or neuter, as hereafter exemplified.
A neuter verb expresses neither action nor passion, but being, or a state of being; as, John sits. ”

“ What is a noun?"
"A noun is a word used as the name of any object."
"Very well. A noun, then, is a name-word."
"But why is not every word a name-word just the same?" asked Walter.
"Different sorts of words have different uses," said Mrs. Dane. "If I say, 'Walter, come here,' by the word Walter, I name an object or person; and it is therefore a name-word, or noun. Noun means name. By the word come, I tell Walter what to do; and therefore come is a different sort of word from a name-word. ”

“ To follow back to its very beginnings the genesis of nouns, and of the forms of nouns, is much more difficult than to explain the origin of verbal forms. Some nouns—of which the Latin vox (voc-s) , 'a calling, a voice,' and rex (reg-s) , 'one ruling, a king,' are as familiar examples as any within our reach—are produced directly from the roots, by the addition of a different system of inflectional endings; the idea of substantiation or impersonation of the action expressed by the root being arbitrarily laid in them by usage, as was the idea of predication in the forms of the verb. ”

“ A noun is sometimes nominative to a verb placed many lines after the noun. You must exercise your judgment in this matter. Look at the sentence in the preceding exercises beginning with, "He who, every morning," &c. and see if you can find the verb to which he is nominative. What does he do? He carries on a thread, &c. He, then, is nominative to the verb carries. What does who do? Who plans, and who follows, &c. Then who is nom. to plans, and who understood, is nominative to follows.
"A soul without reflection, like a pile
Without inhabitant, to ruin runs." ”

“ Noun, standing up. “You have seen how my words can be Nominative Case or Objective Case; but there is a case in which they are neither of these two. For instance, in the sentence, ‘The monkey pulled the cat’s tail,’—pulled is the verb; monkey is the nominative, for the monkey did the pulling; tail is the objective, for ‘what did the monkey pull?’ The tail—but then what case is cat’s? It is not nominative nor objective.” ”

“ Thus, by a change of form in the words employed, we have from house a plural houses; and in like manner men from man. We give also a particular form to a noun in order to mark its value as indicating the possessor of anything: thus man’s, men’s, from man and men; and, in most pronouns, we make a change of form to signify the objective relation as distinguished from that of subject: thus, me, us, him, her, them, whom, as compared with I, we, he, she, they, who. ”

“ The verb is, when contracted, sometimes gives to its nominative the same form as that of the possessive case, it not being always spaced off for distinction, as it may be; as,
"A wit's a feather, and a chief a rod;
An honest man's the noblest work of God."
—Pope, on Man, Ep. iv, l. 247.
OBS. 24.—As the objective case of nouns is to be distinguished from the nominative, only by the sense, relation, and position, of words in a sentence, the learner must acquire a habit of attending to these several things. ”

“ Declension of Nouns. We learned above (§§ 19, 20) the difference between the subject and object, and that in English they may be distinguished by the order of the words. Sometimes, however, the order is such that we are left in doubt. For example, the sentence The lady her daughter loves might mean either that the lady loves her daughter, or that the daughter loves the lady.
1. If the sentence were in Latin, no doubt could arise, because the subject and the object are distinguished, not by the order of the words, but by the endings of the words themselves. ”

“ They who begin by being so bold as to despise the water, which He commanded to be used, it is very natural, as far as I see, that they should end by despising the word which He commanded to be spoken,—the sacred name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Rule 1.—All words connected with a nominative case by the copula (i.e., the so-called verb-substantive) must be nominative.—It is I; I am safe.
Rule 2.—All words in apposition with a word so connected must be nominative.—It is difficult to illustrate this from the English language from our want of inflexions. In Latin, however, we say vocor Johannes=I am called John, not vocor Johannem. Here the logical equivalent is ego sum vocatus Johannes—where—
1. Ego, is nominative because it is the subject.
2. Vocatus is nominative because it is the predicate agreeing with the subject. ”

“ I shall hereafter have occasion to show how a whole phrase may be used to name an idea, and as such stand as the agent or object of a verb.
Some nouns are specifically used to designate certain objects, and distinguish them from the class to which they usually belong. In this way they assume a distinctive character, and are usually denominated proper nouns. They apply to persons, places and things; as, John Smith, Boston, Hylax. Boy is applied in common to all young males of the human species, and as such is a common noun or name. ”

“ Unless I give you the noun, you do not understand. Thus every object is represented by a word which is its name; and this name is a noun. To understand whether a word is a noun or not, you simply ask: Is it a thing? Would it answer if I spoke to it? or Could I carry it to the teacher? For instance, bread: yes, bread is an object; table: yes, it is an object; conductor: yes, the conductor would answer, if I were to speak to him.
Let us look through our cards now. I take several cards from different boxes and shuffle them. ”

“ As you have been analyzing nouns in their three cases, it becomes necessary to present, in the next place, the declension of nouns, for you must decline every noun you parse. Declension means putting a noun through the different cases: and you will notice, that the possessive case varies from the nominative in its termination, or ending, but the objective case ends like the nominative. The nominative and objective cases of nouns, must, therefore, be ascertained by their situation in the sentence, or by considering the office they perform. ”

“ Then you are to be sure that the verb agrees with it. You must say ‘ducks swim,’ not ‘ducks swims;’ and as ducks is the third person and plural number, swim will be third person and plural number too.”
“Please, my lord,” said Pronoun, “when I am Nominative you need very seldom take the trouble to ask any question to find out the Nominative, for most of my words show at once what they are in. I, thou, he, she, we, and they will never allow themselves to be used except as Nominatives. They were born Nominatives, they say, and will not degrade themselves by being anything else. ”

“ The other words, which occur in the above account of the doctrine,—Three, One, He, God, Father, Son, Spirit,—are none of them words peculiar to theology, have all a popular meaning, and are used according to that obvious and popular meaning, when introduced into the Catholic dogma. No human words indeed are worthy of the Supreme Being, none are adequate; but we have no other words to use but human, and those in question are among the simplest and most intelligible that are to be found in language. ”

“ The Nominalists, following the principles of the Stoics, maintained that General Notions, Universalia, are mere abstractions of the understanding, Nomina, which as such have no reality outside the human mind, Universalia post res. ”

“ Noun, Verb, Participle, Article, Pronoun, Preposition, Adverb, and Conjunction. The proper noun, as a species, is subordinate to the noun. [22]
14. On the Noun (ὄνομα) .
A Noun is a declinable part of speech, signifying something either concrete or abstract (concrete, as stone; abstract, as education) ; common or proper (common, as man, horse; proper, as Socrates, Plato) . [23] It has five accidents: genders, species, forms, numbers, and cases.
There are three Genders, the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. Some add to these two more, the common and the epicene—common, as man, horse ”

“ We may realize more intimately the analogical potency of names by recalling their survivals from the solemn uses of curses and excommunications, to the charms carried about the person consisting of magic or cabalistic writing, to the playful or the serious German usage of saying unberufen, and rapping three times under the table if a word or thought "tempting Providence" has fallen from the lips. Clearly, if we follow analogy as a guide, there is much in a name. ”

“ In former lectures we have confined our remarks to things and a description of their characters and relations, so that every entity of which we can conceive a thought, or concerning which we can form an expression, has been defined and described in the use of nouns and adjectives. Every thing in creation, of which we think, material or immaterial, real or imaginary, and to which we give a name, to represent the idea of it, comes under the class of words called nouns. ”

“ Nouns then express things whose being is completed, not whose being is in process, or whose being depends upon some other being. And that no doubt accounts for the feeling that when one is using nouns, one is manipulating the symbols of a self-subsistent reality. ”

“ And it is this superadded idea of action that superadds to the verb the phenomena of tense, mood, person, and voice; in other words, the phenomena of conjugation.
§ 343. A noun is a word capable of declension only. A {290}verb is a word capable of declension and conjugation also. The fact of verbs being declined as well as conjugated must be remembered. The participle has the declension of a noun adjective, the infinite mood the declension of a noun substantive. Gerunds and supines, in languages where they occur, are only names for certain cases of the verb. ”

“ The distinction between noun and verb might seem, at first sight, to be well marked both by the diversity of forms which characterise these separate parts of speech, and by the diversity of functions which they severally fulfil. But in English, we are at once met by the fact that we have numerous verbs which are identical in form with nouns, and in many cases are actually nouns employed as verbs; as, to lord it, to walk, to dog, to run: while we constantly see the process going on before our eyes, of the transference of a noun into the category of verbs; as, to chair a man, to table a motion. ”

“ For, indeed, the distinction between noun and verb, between active and passive, between nominative and accusative, does not help us much towards a scientific analysis of language. It is no more than a first grasp, and it can only be compared with the most elementary terminology in other branches of human knowledge. ”

“ These are declined like nouns, of which latter there are six forms, the masculine in â, o, and y, the feminine in a, oo, and e; the plurals being formed exactly as in the pronominal suffixes of the verb. The root-word, without inflexion, alone is used where the name is employed in no connection with a verb, where in every terrestrial language the nominative would be employed. ”

“ When the noun in genitive case has the force of an adjective, it is not preceded by the article, but its initial consonant is subject to precisely the same rules, with regard to aspiration and eclipsis, as if it were a simple adjective, i.e., it is aspirated if the governing noun be nominative or accusative singular feminine, or genitive singular masculine. ”

“ Nomic, nom′ik, adj. customary, applied to the common mode of spelling—opp. to Glossic and Phonetic. [Gr. nomos, custom.]
Nominal, nom′in-al, adj. pertaining to a name: existing only in name: having a name.—ns. Nom′inalism, the doctrine that general terms have no corresponding reality either in or out of the mind, being mere words; Nom′inalist, one of a sect of philosophers who held the doctrine of nominalism.—adj. ”

“ Write side by side the declension of domina, dominus, and pīlum. A comparison of the forms will lead to the following rules, which are of great importance because they apply to all five declensions:
a. The vocative, with a single exception (see § 73. b) , is like the nominative. That is, the vocative singular is like the nominative singular, and the vocative plural is like the nominative plural.
b. The nominative, accusative, and vocative of neuter nouns are alike, and in the plural end in -a.
c. The accusative singular of masculines and feminines ends in -m and the accusative plural in -s. ”