 Anonymous wrote: |
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Thank you so much. As I asked originally, are they just the rules of law that have been enacted by a body of scholars in semantics or linguistics or what? How can a noun be designated as a proper noun? A noun just does not appear as a proper noun naturally or does it? I am not too keen on its biological origin. Help. As you can surmise, I don't have a major in Biology.
Another one, could you say, "I didn't major in Biology."? |
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The question you raised is tough to answer. But you would be right that most of so called "proper nouns" should have been a common noun in origin. For example, let's take a proper name "Oxford". "Oxford" is said to come originally from "the ford where oxen cross the Thames".
In his grammar book CGEL, Quirk discussed about the discrepancy between common nouns and proper nouns. He pick up four NPs as follows: "the Oxford road", "the Oxford Road", "Oxford Road" and "Oxford". "The Oxford road" means simply "the road to Oxford", a specified road but still it retains the sense of a common noun grammatically. But when the "r" in "road" is capitalized, it makes people have a notion that the whole of the composite noun phrase "the Oxford Road" is a kind of proper name. The deletion of THE, i.e., "Oxford Road", strengthen this notion further, getting the sense close to the concept that the true proper noun "Oxford" has.
Quirk adds:
This gradient or difference in institutionalization between 'the Oxford road and "Oxford" explains why there are many exceptions between the use and no-use of THE for names. It might be better, in fact, to regard names without THE as exceptions to the more general rule that English definite nouns are always modified by THE. But an even better way of looking at this issue is simply to acknowledge that what accounts for apparent exceptions is the absence of a clear-cut boundary between proper names and definite nouns. Consider the following three cases.
1. In 1965-1968, she attended York University.
2. In 1965-1968, she attended (the) Hatfield Polytechnique.
3. In 1965-1968, she attended the Paris Consevatoire.
The reason for using THE in #1 and omitting optionally or obligatorily in #2 and #3 seems to be largely a matter of how far the name is an institutionalized name among English-speaking people.
paco