Indo-European Word Classes
Noun
Carol Justus and Jonathan Slocum
[IN PROGRESS]
The word class (part of speech) noun names persons, places, and things or concepts in the world. A noun is a word that has grammatically functions as Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, or Adpositional Object (object of a preposition or postposition) in a sentence. Nouns might also have a possessive or descriptive relation to another noun.
The morphology of older Indo-European nouns included suffixes and endings. The oldest inherited Indo-European nouns are reflected in nouns of the attested languages that have only inflectional endings.
Inflectional endings for case, number, and "gender" (or class) of the noun signaled the grammatical categories of older Indo-European nouns. In most languages the number of a noun is singular (one) or plural (more than one); but in the oldest IE languages, number could also include a dual (two, as in 'two hands, two eyes').
In many Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, case forms referred to the grammatical relation of the noun to the sentence. The nominative case form marked the subject of a sentence (e.g. 'river' in 'the river runs'), and the accusative case marked the direct object (e.g. 'banks' in 'rivers jump their banks when it rains'). A genitive case marked the relation of a noun to another noun (the possessor 'river' in 'river's bank' or 'bank of the river'). The dative case marked the receiver of an action ('children' in 'parents give children names' or 'parents give names to children').
A noun might also belong to a subclass. In English, nouns are either "count" nouns such as 'book, books' or "mass" nouns such as "butter, honey". Count nouns are counted as one or more than one, but mass nouns typically are not ('People read books', 'Butter is yellow'). In many older IE languages, nouns are often grouped into "genders" as "masculine", "feminine", and "neuter", often with little apparent basis. Older IE 'foot' was grammatically masculine as it is in Spanish and French today, while 'voice' was feminine in languages that classed nouns grammatically into gender classes.
The morpholgoical form of old IE nouns consisted of the root plus endings and were called "root" nouns. The word for 'foot' had only a CVC- root form, with inflectional endings indicating case, number, and gender added directly to the root. Other old nouns had stem-vowels that identified them with a particular noun class; other older and more recent nouns added derivational suffixes.
Indo-European inflectional endings, by contrast with similar endings in agglutinating languages such as Turkish, were discrete; suffixes that can be identified (one for case, another for number), were fusional. It was usually impossible to identify what part of the suffix stood for number as opposed to case, for example. As a result, an entire ending might encapsulate the case, number, and gender of a noun that was typical of a particular noun class for a particular syntactic use.