I believe the (long) tradition of defining nouns as "names for things"
is at least partly based on the etymology of "noun." It basically
*means* "name." 
The Latinate term "nominative" derives from the fact that it was not
only the case used in Latin for subjects, but also the case used if
someone asked you what the name of something was (If little Tertius
pointed at a garbanzo bean and wanted to know what to call it, the
answer would be 'cicero', not 'ciceri' or 'cicerum', etc.). The same
situation applied to Greek, from which the Romans adapted their
grammars. If I remember correctly (and that's not just a rhetorical
tag!), Aristotle divided sentences into an 'onoma' and a 'rhema', which
is frequently taken as 'subject' and 'predicate' but could also be
loosely translated as 'name' and 'thing said about the name.'

That does not, of course, mean that we should simply replicate the
definition over and over. Getting into an argument over "name-hood" or
the nature of reference has been a cottage industry among philosophers
for over two millenia, so I doubt we're going to resolve that issue.
Figuring out a better pedagogic approach to defining the grammatical
category, though, may be doable. 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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