The proper name is name a noun expressed by the word or, naming a specific object or phenomenon. In contrast to the common noun, denoting at once a whole of objects or phenomena, name own is meant for one, quite a certain object this class. For example, "" is a common noun name noun, while "War and Peace" is its own. The word "river" is name common noun, but "Cupid" - name proper. Proper names can be the names of people, patronymics, titles of books, songs, films, geographical names. proper names are written with capital letter. 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"), and other types of nouns. When translating proper names into others languages ​​and transcription methods are used: Gogolya-street (Gogol street), radio Mayak (radio "Mayak"). Proper names are not specially distinguished. 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, "avatar" was just a household name until "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 race car driver, but gradually all fans of fast driving began to be called “Schumachers”. Common nouns from proper names can go trademarks, which are unique producers a certain kind goods or simply monopolists. A striking example is the company Xerox, which produces electrophotographic copiers. This firm exists to this day, but "copiers" are now called all copiers in general.

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• how to spell proper names

Advice 2: How to determine whether your own name or common noun

Nouns name objects, phenomena or concepts. These meanings are expressed using the categories of gender, number, and case. All nouns belong to the groups of own and common nouns. Proper nouns, which serve as the names of single objects, are opposed to common nouns, denoting generalized names of homogeneous objects.

Instruction

To determine proper nouns, determine whether the name is an individual designation of the subject, i.e. does it highlight " name» an object from a number of homogeneous (Moscow, Russia, Sidorov). Own nouns call names and surnames of persons and nicknames of animals (Nekrasov, Pushok, Frou-frou); geographical and astronomical objects (America, Stockholm, Venus); , organizations, print media (Pravda newspaper, Spartak team, Eldorado store).

Proper names, as a rule, do not change in numbers and are used only in the singular (Voronezh) or only in the plural (Sokolniki). Please note that there are exceptions to this rule. Proper nouns are used in the form plural, if they denote different persons and objects that are called the same (both Americas, namesakes of the Petrovs); persons who are related (the Fedorov family). Also proper nouns can be used in the plural form, if they call a certain type of people, "highlighted" according to quality characteristics famous literary character. Please note that in this meaning, nouns lose their sign of belonging to a group of single objects, therefore, both the use of an uppercase and a lowercase letter (Chichikovs, Famusovs, Pechorins) is acceptable.

An orthographic feature that distinguishes proper nouns is the use of a capital letter and. At the same time, all proper names are always letters, and the names of institutions, organizations, works, objects are used as applications and are enclosed in quotation marks (the ship "Fyodor Chaliapin", Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons"). Any parts of speech can be included in the application, but the first word is always capitalized (Daniel Defoe's novel "The Life and Wonders of the Sailor Robinson Crusoe").

The noun in Russian has various hallmarks. To show the features of the occurrence and use of certain language units, they are divided into common nouns and proper nouns.

Instruction

Common nouns are nouns that denote the name of certain objects and phenomena that have a common set of features. These objects or phenomena belong to any class, but in themselves do not carry any special indications of this. In linguistics, a common noun is also called an appellative.

Common names are signs of linguistic concepts and are opposed to proper names - which are used as names and nicknames of living beings or names and names of objects and phenomena. When common nouns become proper names, they lose their name language concept(for example, the name "Gum" from the word "gum" - "right").

There are several types of common nouns, among which are specific (table), abstract or abstract (love), material or real (sugar), as well as collective ().

Common nouns can denote not only classes of objects, but also any individual objects within a given class. Such a phenomenon occurs if the individual characteristics of the object lose their meaning, for example: "Do not tease the dog, otherwise it will bite you." In this case, the word "dog" means any dog, not any specific one. This also includes situations that describe only one object of a certain class, for example: “Meet me at noon at the corner,” that is, the interlocutors know which particular corner they are talking about. Also common names nouns are used to describe the individual characteristics of an object using additional definitions, for example: “I am the day when I first saw her” - highlighting a particular day among others.

Common nouns are closely related to proper names. For example, common nouns can become proper in the form of names, nicknames and nicknames (for example, "Kalita" as the nickname of Prince Ivan Danilovich), and proper nouns can become common nouns to refer to homogeneous objects. Such transitions are called eponyms and are usually used in a pejorative or jocular sense (for example, “esculapius” is the collective name of all doctors, “pelé” is football fans, and “Schumacher” is fans of fast driving). According to the rules of the Russian language, proper names are accepted with, and common nouns - in capital letters.

The Russian language is a complex and at the same time harmonious system. Words are made up of morphemes, sentences are made up of words, texts are made up of sentences. Each named category is part of a specific section: vocabulary, phonetics, word formation,. All words in the Russian language are divided into large lexical and grammatical categories. These discharges are studied in morphology. This section studies the parts of speech and their grammatical features. Perhaps the most numerous group is the group of nouns.

Important! The noun has a general categorical meaning of the subject.

They are divided into groups for various reasons. Nouns are proper and common nouns, animate and inanimate, masculine, neuter and female, declinable, non-declining and dissimilar. Proper and common nouns are the subject of this article.

They are written as part of a sentence with a small letter, except when required by the rules of punctuation. For example, it can be the beginning of a sentence or a sentence with direct speech.

All common nouns are divided into subgroups according to their meaning:

• specific. These are words denoting concepts that are tangible. In other words, these objects are real, they can be picked up. For example: printer, table, spoon, phone, pencil case, organizer, fox, piano, castle, tree, pine, earth, moon, sponsor, magazine.
• Abstract. That is, those that denote concepts that a person can feel, but he cannot touch them. Examples: love, friendship, confusion, fear, emotions, malaise, hatred, sympathy, affection, novelty, slyness, attraction.
• Collective. They represent groups of people united common feature. For example: children, students, teachers, youth, pensioners, schoolchildren.
• Real. They represent any substance. For example: semolina, gold, oil, plastic, glass, corn, barley, peas.

Proper nouns

A fairly large group of nouns is distinguished, which have the meaning of uniqueness, singularity, separateness. That is, they somehow stand out from the general range of objects, phenomena, concepts.

In Russian, they are usually called their own. Proper nouns are always written with a capital letter. In some cases, they can be written not only with a capital letter, but also in quotation marks.

Informative! Russian lessons: - meet or meet

Proper nouns are divided into types:

• Surnames, first names and patronymics of people, as well as pseudonyms: Ivan Bunin, Alexander Grin, Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov, Antosha Chekhonte, Theodore Dreiser, Victor Hugo, Prosper Merimee.
• Animal names: Murka, Mukhtar, bouquet, Zhdanka, Milka, Chernysh, White, Bold, Fluff.
• Names from the field of geography and astronomy: Mars, Pluto, Ursa Major, Transbaikalia, Dniester, Pripyat, Moscow, Sayans, Carpathians, Volga, Yenisei, Aldebaran, Izumrudny microdistrict, Vasilievka village, Baikal, Victoria, Australia, Eurasia.
• Names of the most important historical events, as well as holidays: Battle of Borodino, New Year, Battle of Waterloo, Kursk Bulge, Battle of Stalingrad, Mamaev Kurgan.
• Names of works of art and literary works: "Quiet Don", "Young Guard", "Fathers and Sons", "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Robinson Crusoe", "Moonlight Sonata", "Music of Tears", "Leningrad Symphony", "Morning in the Forest", "The Extraordinary Adventures of Niels" with wild geese".
• Names of printed periodicals, television and radio programs, names of institutions: "Events", "Vesti-Mayak", Bolshoi Theater, Moscow Art Theater, Novoshirokinsky mine, "Literary newspaper", "Today", "Wedding in Malinovka", Novoorlovskaya school.

Peculiarities

It must be remembered that there is no clear division into proper and common names.

Important! Nouns can change their status depending on the context and speech situation.

A striking example of a situation where one's own has become a household name is the story of the Mercedes car brand, when this word began to mean any large and expensive car, and the Xerox company began to mean copying in general. And vice versa, an example of the transition of a common noun into its own: snowball - dog Snowball; products - shop "Products".

The correct spelling of proper and common nouns is explained quite easily.

The first ones are always capitalized. The latter should always be written with a lowercase letter, except for cases that are subject to the strict regularity of the punctuation rules of the Russian language.

There are some more features of proper and common nouns. These features will help determine exactly which category a word belongs to:

• Proper nouns cannot form plural forms. An exception may be the names of persons of the same family: the Vasiliev couple, the Ignatiev, Silin, Chetveryakov families.
• Common nouns are able to form a plural form. The only exceptions are those that always have the form only singular (milk, children, teachers).

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Summing up

Naturally, it is not difficult for native speakers to determine whether a noun belongs to a particular group. But for foreigners, when studying the Russian language, it can be quite difficult to do this. For this reason, the grammatical indicators of proper and are important. The greatest difficulty is in those cases when there is a process of transition from one group of nouns to another. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was right when he said that not knowing a language is akin to a state when a person does not have a passport. Indeed, the Russian language is rightfully one of the most difficult languages ​​in terms of grammar in the modern world.

denoting the name ( common name) a whole class of objects and phenomena that have a certain common set of features, and name 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, 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 into several categories according to them:

1. 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.
2. Names guns(instrumenti) having the same suffixes with
3. names places(loci);
4. Nouns collective(collective)
5. diminutives
6. Names action(n. actionis), formed by very diverse suffixes, of which the forms that form 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: the declension of nouns is no different from that of adjectives 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” (cob. “bare foot”), Church Slavonic chrnovlas “black-haired” (cob. “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 as something inherent in another subject - 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 police officer in "The Power of Darkness").

Quite often, students ask: "What is a common noun and a proper name?" Despite the simplicity of the question, not everyone knows the definition of these terms and the rules for writing such words. Let's figure it out. After all, in fact, everything is extremely simple and clear.

Common noun

The most significant layer of nouns are They denote the names of a class of objects or phenomena that have a number of features by which they can be attributed to the specified class. For example, common nouns are: cat, table, corner, river, girl. They do not name any particular object or person, animal, but designate a whole class. When we use these words, we mean any cat or dog, any table. Such nouns are written with a small letter.

In linguistics, common nouns are also called appellatives.

Proper name

Unlike common nouns, they make up an insignificant layer of nouns. These words or phrases denote a specific and specific object that exists in a single copy. Proper names include names of people, names of animals, names of cities, rivers, streets, countries. For example: Volga, Olga, Russia, Danube. They are always capitalized and refer to a specific person or single object.

The science of onomastics is engaged in the study of proper names.

Onomastics

So, what is a common noun and a proper name, we have sorted it out. Now let's talk about onomastics - a science that studies proper names. At the same time, not only names are considered, but also the history of their occurrence, how they have changed over time.

Onomast scientists distinguish several directions in this science. So, the study of the names of people is engaged in anthroponymy, the name of peoples - ethnonymy. Cosmonymics and astronomy study the names of stars and planets. Animal nicknames are explored by zoonymy. Theonymy deals with the names of the gods.

This is one of the most promising branches in linguistics. Until now, research on onomastics is being carried out, articles are being published, conferences are being held.

Transition of common nouns to proper names, and vice versa

A common noun and a proper name can move from one group to another. Quite often it happens that a common noun becomes a proper name.

For example, if a person is called by a name that was previously included in the class of common nouns, it becomes its own. A vivid example of such a transformation is the names Vera, Love, Hope. Previously, they were common nouns.

Surnames formed from common nouns also pass into the category of anthroponyms. So, you can highlight the names Kot, Cabbage and many others.

As for proper names, they quite often pass into another category. Often this refers to the names of people. Many inventions bear the names of their authors, sometimes the names of scientists are assigned to quantities or phenomena discovered by them. So, we know the units of ampere and newton.

The names of the heroes of the works can become common nouns. So, the names Don Quixote, Oblomov, Uncle Styopa became the designation of certain features of appearance or character characteristic of people. Names and surnames of historical figures and celebrities can also be used as common nouns, for example, Schumacher and Napoleon.

In such cases, it is necessary to clarify what exactly the addresser has in mind in order to avoid mistakes when writing the word. But often you can from the context. We think you understand what a common noun and a proper name are. The examples we have given show this quite clearly.

Rules for writing proper names

As you know, all parts of speech obey the rules of spelling. Nouns - common noun and proper - are also no exception. Remember a few simple rules that will help you prevent annoying mistakes further.

1. Proper names are always capitalized, for example: Ivan, Gogol, Catherine the Great.
2. Nicknames of people are also capitalized, but without quotation marks.
3. Proper names used in the meaning of common nouns are written with a small letter: donquixote, donjuan.
4. If service words or generic names (cape, city) stand next to a proper name, then they are written with a small letter: the Volga River, Lake Baikal, Gorky Street.
5. If a proper name is the name of a newspaper, cafe, book, then it is taken in quotation marks. In this case, the first word is written with a capital letter, the rest, if they do not belong to proper names, are written with a small letter: "Master and Margarita", "Russian Truth".
6. Common nouns are written with a small letter.

As you can see, quite simple rules. Many of them are known to us since childhood.

Summing up

All nouns are divided into two large classes - proper nouns and common nouns. The first is much less than the second. Words can move from one class to another, while acquiring a new meaning. Proper names are always capitalized. Common nouns - with a small one.