2.1 Different kinds of nouns

In this video, we're going to take a closer look at the grammatical category known as nouns. If we start from the idea that nouns are for naming things, we might question what we actually mean by a thing. Things don't need to be something you can pick up and put in your pocket. They don't even need to be things you can touch or point to. Think about nouns like humanity, freedom, or poverty, for example.

There are several useful ways of classifying nouns that draw out some of the differences between those that refer to objects and those that refer to other things, like ideas. One of the first distinctions we can make is between common and proper nouns. Basically, this is the difference between the nouns "dog" and "Patch." There are many dogs, but only one Patch. Yes, it's not an unusual name for a dog. But every time an owner shouts, Patch, they are referring to only one particular animal.

The same goes for people's names. When someone says, hello, Luis, or Greta, or Samira, George, etc, the noun refers to one specific individual. These are all proper nouns. Other examples of proper nouns are France, Tokyo, Wednesday, Everest, Google, Shakespeare, Christmas, and a whole host of others.

As a rule, English proper nouns start with a capital letter. So they're quite easy to spot. Unlike in German, where all nouns start with a capital letter independent of what type they are. Another clue when trying to decide whether a word is a proper noun or not is to question whether it sounds odd to put an "a" or "an" in front of it. "A Birmingham" might sound a little strange. But "a dog" or "a cat" sounds fine.

Proper nouns don't like having "a" or "the" put in front of them. All the other nouns-- cat, cabbage, country, explanation, doubt, objection, prize, complication, and dog-- are classed as common nouns. Common nouns account for the overwhelming majority of nouns. Another major classification of nouns is into count nouns and non-count nouns. Or mass nouns, as they are sometimes called. Literally this means whether you can count how many of something there are.

All the common nouns we've just seen can be counted. One cat, two dogs, three prizes, 15 countries, and so on. But what about nouns like milk, grass, or traffic? We don't tend to say one milk, two milks, or seven traffics and four grasses. These are non-count nouns. We tend to refer to how much of these there are rather than how many. So you can have some milk, but not one milk. And so much traffic, but not five traffic.

If you wanted to count up the non-count nouns, in most cases, you have to refer to a unit or a container of some sort. So you might say a bottle, a glass, or a pint of milk. Or two bottles, two glasses, and two pints of milk. In this case, we're actually counting the bottles, glasses, and pints-- not the milk itself. You can see similar examples for grass, paper, and traffic. We can have a blade of grass or seven blades of grass, a ream of paper or four reams of paper, and a lane of traffic or six lanes of traffic.

Many known count nouns are materials such as food and drink. Things like butter, bread, or milk. They also relate to what things are made of. Things like wood, metal, granite, or plastic. Nouns for collections of things like furniture, information, or luggage, can also be non-count. One way to decide whether something is a count noun or a non-count noun is to see if adding a number in front of it and then an s after the noun sounds sensible.

So we can have seven hamsters, seven problems, and seven tools. These are the count nouns. But you wouldn't usually come across seven furniture, seven equipments, or seven granites. These are non-count nouns. There are some ambiguous cases that come about because words can have different senses. For example, we can say five cabbages when referring to the plant. But we would ask the question, would you like some cabbage, when referring to the food.

Or you might say, I've bought four irons in the last 12 months. Here, "iron" is a count noun referring to the household appliance. But iron can also be a non-count noun, as in, I saw a lot of scrap iron at the city's waste facility. These are some of the little glitches that tend to develop in languages which evolve largely unplanned over centuries. It would be very strange if after all this time, there weren't some odd examples like this tucked away here and there.

One final classification of nouns is their division into the categories of abstract nouns and concrete nouns. Concrete nouns are those that refer to things which can be perceived by the physical senses, such as a tree, a clock, the Sphynx, or a motorbike. There is a clear contrast, for example, between a living, breathing person like a nurse, and a big idea like humanity. Or a big piece of engineering like a train, and a concept like mobility. Both humanity and mobility refer to more abstract concepts, and as such, they are abstract nouns. Whereas the nurse and the train are concrete nouns.

Another everyday example would be the difference between a meal that you sit down to eat and enjoy, which is a concrete noun, and the broader concept of nutrition, which is an abstract noun. Nouns can and generally do fall into more than one of these categories. So for example, tomato is a common count concrete noun. Whereas love is a common non-count abstract noun.

Now that you've been introduced to these categories, you can start to test how good you are at sorting nouns into their different types.