In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category 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.[1] Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase. In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is a change in form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a noun may play the role of subject ("I kicked the ball"), of direct object ("John kicked me"), or of possessor ("My ball"). Languages such as ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit had ways of altering or inflecting nouns to mark roles which are not specially marked in English, such as the ablative case ("John kicked the ball away from the house") and the instrumental case ("John kicked the ball with his foot"). In ancient Greek those last three words would be rendered t podi ( ), with the noun pous (, foot) changing to podi to reflect the fact that John is using his foot as an instrument (any adjective modifying "foot" would also change case to match). Usually a language is said to "have cases" only if nouns change their form (decline) to reflect their case in this way. Other languages perform the same function in different ways. English, for example, uses prepositions like "of" or "with" in front of a noun to indicate functions which in ancient Greek or Latin would be indicated by changing (declining) the ending of the noun itself. More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads."[1] Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin several thematic roles have an associated case, but cases are a syntactic notion, while thematic roles are a semantic one. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, since thematic roles are not dependent on position in a sentence. Nomenclature is a term that applies to either a list of names and/or terms, or to the system of principles, procedures and terms related to naming - which is the assigning of a word or phrase to a particular object or property.[1] [clarification needed] The principles of naming vary from the relatively informal conventions of everyday speech to the internationally-agreed principles, rules and recommendations that govern the formation and use of the specialist terms used in scientific and other disciplines. Naming "things" is a part of our general communication using words and language: it is an aspect of everyday taxonomy as we distinguish the objects of our experience, together with their similarities and differences, which we identify, name and classify. The use of names, as the many different kinds of nouns embedded in different languages, connects nomenclature to theoretical linguistics, while the way we mentally structure the world in relation to word meanings and experience relates to the philosophy of language. Onomastics, the study of proper names and their origins, includes: anthroponymy, concerned with human names, including personal names, surnames and nicknames; toponymy the study of place names; and etymology, the derivation, history and use of names as revealed through comparative and descriptive linguistics. The scientific need for simple, stable and internationally-accepted systems for naming objects of the natural world has generated many formal nomenclatural systems. Probably the best known of these nomenclatural systems are the five codes of biological nomenclature that govern the Latinized scientific names of organisms.