ABSTRACT
Nouns have a significant role in any language. There are hundreds of thousands of words in English and the majority of these are nouns. The first words a child speaks are mainly nouns for the important people and things in their world. Attempts to communicate with chimpanzees use pictures to represent objects. Perhaps the origins of language began with nouns? The need to identify new phenomena accounts for a large part of language change: most of the entries in any Dictionary of New Words are nouns, with fewer additions to verbs and adjectives.
