Proper noun

“ 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. ”

“ To parse a noun is to state the class to which it belongs, its gender, number, case, and its grammatical relation to other words in the sentence.
The changes in meaning and use which nouns undergo with or without a change in form, are called their inflections.
The inflections of the noun are number and case.
EXERCISE.
Parse all the nouns in the following sentences:—
Model.—John, a proper, concrete noun; masculine gender; singular number; nominative case, subject of lost.
Teacher’s, a common, concrete noun; masculine or feminine gender; singular number; possessive case, possessing book. ”

“ Nouns are sometimes used as verbs, and verbs, as nouns, according to their manner of meaning; and nouns are sometimes used as adjectives, and adjectives, as nouns. This matter will be explained in the concluding part of this lecture, where you will be better prepared to comprehend it.
NOUNS are of two kinds, common and proper.
A Common noun is the name of a sort or species of things; as, man, tree, river.
A Proper noun is the name of an individual; as, Charles, Ithaca, Ganges.
A noun signifying many, is called a collective noun, or noun of multitude; as, the people, the army. ”

“ FORMULE.—Not proper, because the pronouns I and thou, of the nominative case, are here put in apposition with the preceding pronoun us, which is objective. But, according to Rule 3d, "A noun or a personal pronoun, used to explain a preceding noun or pronoun, is put, by apposition, in the same case." Therefore, I and thou should be thee and me; (the first person, in our idiom, being usually put last;) ”

“ Thus the consonant sounds of w and y, even when expressed by other letters, require a and not an before them.
A common noun, when taken in its widest sense, usually admits no article: as, "A candid temper is proper for man; that is, for all mankind."--Murray. ”

“ Whether we say "a good man" or "a bad man," "good men" or "bad men," the words minno and mudjee remain the same. But all the declinable and coalescing adjectives—adjectives which join on, and, as it were, melt into the body of the substantive—take the usual plural inflections, and are governed by the same rules in regard to their use, as the substantive; personal adjectives requiring personal plurals, &c.
[500]
Peculiar circumstances are supposed to exist in order to render the use of the adjective, in this connection with the noun, necessary and proper. ”

“ Common nouns may be concrete (man, windmill) , or abstract (gratitude, nearness) . A noun applied to a group is said to be collective (family, race) . The uses of a noun are: to serve as the subject of a verb, to serve as the object of a verb or a preposition, to be in apposition with another noun (Jenkins, our coach) , to indicate possession (Joseph's coat of many colors) ; and less frequently, to serve as an adjective (the brick sidewalk) or adverb (John went home) , and to indicate direct address (Jehovah, help us!) . Pronoun.A pronoun is a word which takes the place of a noun. ”

“ CHAPTER II.—Syntax of Nouns. SUBJECT.
166. The Subject of a Finite Verb (i.e. any form of the Indicative, Subjunctive, or Imperative) is in the Nominative Case.
1. The Subject may be—
a) A Noun or Pronoun; as,—
puer scrībit, the boy writes;
hīc scrībit, this man writes.
b) An Infinitive; as,—
decōrum est prō patriā morī, to die for one's county is a noble thing.
c) A Clause; as,—
opportūnē accīdit quod vīdistī, it happened opportunely that you saw.
2. A Personal Pronoun as Subject is usually implied in the Verb and is not separately expressed; as,—
scrībō, I write ”

“ A verb that is regularly intransitive sometimes takes as object a noun whose meaning closely resembles its own.
A noun in this construction is called the cognate object of the verb and is in the objective case (p. 52) .
13. A noun, or a group of words consisting of a noun and its modifiers, may be used adverbially. Such a noun is called an adverbial objective (p. 53) .
14. An appositive is in the same case as the substantive which it limits (p. 42) .
15. A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender, number, and person (p. 55) . ”

“ Whenever the sentence is introduced by a phrase consisting in part of a noun in the plural, or several nouns in the singular or plural, and, especially, where the subject follows the verb; care must be taken to keep the nominative well in mind, so that the verb may be in strict accord with it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The young student should not permit himself to be discouraged by the apparent difficulty of the task of forming the habit of correct speech. It is habit and rapidly becomes easier after the first efforts.
The relation of a noun to a verb, to another noun, or to a preposition is called its case. There are three cases called the nominative, objective, and possessive. When the noun does something it is in the nominative case and is called the subject of the verb. ”

“ NOUN.
Is of one uniform declension in four cases: nominative (subject) ; genitive (possessive) ; dative (indirect objective) ; accusative (direct objective) ; thus—
Every noun in the language follows this declension; i. e. the nominative is changed by a, e, and i to the genitive, dative, and accusative respectively, and s added to each case gives its plural.
(See page 33.)
PRONOUNS.
(a) Personal.
(These follow the declension of nouns, and ol (thou) should be used when a single person is meant.) ”

“ The nominative and the objective case of a noun are always alike in form. In some pronouns, however, there is a difference (as,—I, me; he, him) .
Declension of Nouns 87. The inflection of a substantive is called its declension. To decline a noun is to give its case-forms in order, first in the singular number and then in the plural. ”

“ Or with a reversed fortune a word lives on as a noun, but has perished as a verb—thus as a noun substantive, a ‘slug’, but no longer ‘to slug’ or render slothful; a ‘child’, but no longer ‘to child’, (“childing autumn”, Shakespeare) ; a ‘rape’, but not ‘to rape’ (South) ; a ‘rogue’, but not ‘to rogue’; ‘malice’, but not ‘to malice’; a ‘path’, but not ‘to path’; or as a noun adjective, ‘serene’, but not ‘to serene’, a beautiful word, which we have let go, as the French have ‘sereiner’ [151] ; ‘meek’, [136] but not ‘to meek’ (Wiclif) ; ‘fond’, but not ‘to fond’ (Dryden) ”

“ NOTE VII.—Two or more distinct subject phrases connected by and, require a plural verb, and generally a plural noun too, if a nominative follow the verb; as, "To be wise in our own eyes, to be wise in the opinion of the world, and to be wise in the sight of our Creator, are three things so very different, as rarely to coincide."—Blair. ”

“ So darkness, which in English appears to have no plural, is expressed in Latin by tenebræ, in French by ténèbres, which have no singular. It is necessary that every noun should be understood to be of one number or the other; for, in connecting it with a verb, or in supplying its place by a pronoun, we must assume it to be either singular or plural. ”

“ Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, Interjection—undeclined. Most schoolboys would like to decline them altogether.
20 OF A NOUN.
A noun is a name,—whether it be a Christian name, or a sur-name—the name of a prince, a pig, a pancake, or a post. Whatever is—is a noun.
Nouns are divided into substantives and adjectives.
A noun substantive is its own trumpeter, and speaks for itself without assistance from any other word—brassica, a cabbage; sartor, a tailor; medicus, a physician; vetula, an old woman; venenum, poison; are examples of substantives. ”

“ The noun that speaks [,] is the first person; as, I, James, was present. The noun that is spoken to, is the second person; as, James, were you present? The noun that is spoken of is the third person; as, James was present."—Adams's System of English Gram., p. 9. What can be a greater blunder, than to call the first person of a verb, of a pronoun, or even of a noun, "the noun that speaks?" What can be more absurd than are the following assertions? "Nouns are in the first person when speaking. ”

“ When singular pronouns, or a noun and pronoun, of different persons, are disjunctively connected, the verb must agree with that person which is placed nearest to it: as, 'I or thou art to blame;' 'Thou or I am in fault;' 'I, or thou, or he, is the author of it;' 'George or I am the person.' But it would be better to say ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Whatever one wishes to say, there is only one noun to express it, only one verb to give it life, only one adjective to qualify it. Search, then, till that noun, that verb, that adjective are discovered; never be content with “very nearly”; never have recourse to tricks, however happy ”

“ 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." ”

“ Hands? And when the Verb has two or more Auxiliaries, the Noun or Pronoun is placed after the first; as have I been taught? Cou'd the Truth have been known?
Rule 6th.
The Verb agrees with its governing Noun, Pronoun Personal, or Pronoun Relative, in Number and Person; as the Birds sing, thou lovest, he who loveth.
Rule 7th.
A Noun of Multitude may have a Verb either Singular or Plural; as the People is mad, or the People are mad. ”

“ Is he the only man who has ever had a right notion of its meaning? or is he not rather at fault in his interpretations?
OBS. 21.—There is one other apparent exception to Rule 16th, (or perhaps a real one,) in which there is either an ellipsis of the preposition with, or else the verb is made singular because the first noun only is its true subject, and the others are explanatory nominatives to which the same verb must be understood in the plural number; as, "A torch, snuff and all, goes out in a moment, when dipped in the vapour."—ADDISON: in Johnson's Dict., w. All. ”

“ It is improper, therefore, to say, "The queen looks beautifully," "The flowers smell sweetly," "This writing looks shockingly;" because it is the speaker that performs the act of looking, smelling, &c., not the noun looked at; and though, by an idiomatical construction necessary to avoid circumlocution, the sentence imputes the act to the thing beheld, the qualifying word must express the quality of the thing spoken of, adjectively, instead of qualifying the act of the nominative understood, adverbially. What an adjective is to a noun, an adverb is to a verb ”