Common Nouns

nouns designating the name (common name) of an entire class of objects and phenomena that possess a certain common set of features. Common nouns designate objects or phenomena according to whether they belong to such a class. Common nouns are markers of linguistic concepts and stand in opposition to proper nouns. The transition of common nouns to proper nouns is accompanied by the common noun’s loss of its linguistic concept (for example, Desna, the name of a river, derives from Old Russian desna, “right”). Common nouns can be concrete (stol, “table”), abstract (liubov’, “love”), mass or material (sakhar, “sugar”), and collective (studenchestvo, “student body”). [17–7404]