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A name is a label for a thing, person, place, product (as in a brand name), and even an idea or concept, normally used to distinguish one from another. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A name for a specific individual or plurality is sometimes called a proper name, and is a proper noun. Other nouns are sometimes, more loosely, called names; an older term for them, now obsolete, is general name.
Use of names Naming is the process of assigning a particular word or phrase to a particular object or property. This can be quite deliberate or a natural process that occurs in the flow of life as some phenomenon comes to the attention of the users of a language. Many new words or phrases come into existence during translation as attempts are made to express concepts from one language in another.
Either as a part of the naming process, or later as usage is observed and studied by lexicographers, the word can be defined by a description of the pattern it refers to.
Besides their grammatical function, names can have additional or pure honorary and memorial values. For example, the posthumous name's primary function is commemorative.
Kinds of names - a common name is a name for a plant or animal in a locale's native language, often describing the item's appearance. For example, "buttercup" might describe several unrelated plants with small yellow flowers in different parts of the world. There are millions of possible objects that can be described in science, too many to create common names for every one. As a response, a number of systems of systematic names have been created. An example of a systematic naming scheme is Linnaean taxonomy, which uses Latin names for plants and animals.
- personal name; It is universal for a person to have a name.
- an identifier is
Philosophical accounts of names Proper names function in the same way as common nouns do in many natural languages. Philosophers have thus often treated the two as similar in meaning. In the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that certain puzzling features of both names and nouns could be resolved if we recognized two aspects to the meaning of a name (and, by extension, other nouns): a sense, which is equivalent to some sort of description, and a referent, the thing of things that meet that description. So the sense of dog might be "domestic canine mammal", and the referent would be all the dogs in this world. Proper names would then be special cases of nouns with only one referent: the sense of Aristotle might be, "the author of de Caelo, while its referent would be the one person, Aristotle himself. (See Sense and Reference.)
Bertrand Russell rejected Frege's position, and claimed instead that true names must never be equivalent to a description. However, he conceded that most of the apparent "names" in English really were equivalent to descriptions, specifically to definite descriptions. (These are descriptions which contain the claim that they apply to only one object: see Theory of descriptions.) If there were any real names they probably were more like "this" and "that". This position is perhaps more fairly glossed as the view that there are two different functions nouns can serve: (1) describing (and perhaps indirectly referring); and (2) referring (directly, without description); and that all or almost all English names really do the former. This position came to be known as Descriptivism with respect to singular terms, and was prominent through much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
In 1970 Saul Kripke gave a series of lectures arguing against Descriptivism, and holding, among other things, that names are rigid designators--expressions that refer to their objects independently of any properties those objects have. Of course, we must often use descriptions to pick out our references--to explain to others which object we are talking about, by reference to some property we both agree it bears; but it does not follow that any of these properties constitute the meaning of the name.
Kripke's work led to the development of various versions of the Causal theory of reference, which in various forms claims that our words mean what they do not because of descriptions we associate with them, but because of the causal history of our acquisition of that name in our vocabulary.
Technical names for names A human name is an anthroponym; a toponym is a place name; hydronym is a name of a body of water; an ethnonym is name of an ethnic group. For more, see a list of -onym words.
External link - jimwegryn.com (http://www.jimwegryn.com/names/What%20is%20a%20name.htm) (What is a Name?)
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