Declension

In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular and plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and gender. A declension is also a group of nouns that follow a particular pattern of inflection.

Declension occurs in many of the world's languages, and features very prominently in many European languages. Old English was a highly inflected language, as befits its Indo-European and especially its Germanic linguistic ancestry, but its declensions greatly simplified as it evolved into Modern English.

Modern English

In Modern English, nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical number; consider the difference between book and books. In addition, a few English pronouns have distinct nominative (also called subjective) and oblique (or objective) forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition, or case. Consider the difference between he (subjective) and him (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly, consider who, which is subjective, and the objective whom. Further, these pronouns and a few others have distinct possessive forms, such as his and whose. By contrast, nouns have no distinct nominative and objective forms, the two being merged into a single plain case. For example, chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Possession is shown by the clitic -'s attached to a possessive noun phrase, rather than by declension of the noun itself.

Noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen, literally meaning "name") is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of words defined.

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.

Nouns (album)

Nouns is the first LP (as Weirdo Rippers was a compilation of singles and EPs) by American experimental music duo No Age. It was (partly) recorded at Southern Studios in London. The album was leaked onto the internet on April 16, 2008 and subsequently released by Sub Pop on May 6, 2008. On May 5, it earned a 9.2/10 rating from Pitchfork Media; and is the website's joint highest-reviewed original release of 2008 (along with Dear Science by TV on the Radio and Microcastle by Deerhunter). The album ranked third in Pitchfork Media's list of the top 50 albums of 2008, and was listed at number 50 on Rolling Stone's list of the best albums of 2008.

Packaging

Nouns was released on LP, CD, and via download. The CD version features a 68-page full-color booklet with art, photos, lyrics and information about the release. The album was nominated for a Grammy in the category Best Recording Package.

Reviews

The album received many positive reviews (as indicated by its Metacritic score of 79); "Teen Creeps" was also mentioned as one of the bright spots on the album. In particular, Spin cited "Teen Creeps" as "adding Superchunky pop riffs to the their relentless punk vigor".