We mentioned in a previous post that a word can be broken down into individual letters. In other words, words are formed by a combination of letters.
Now, the focus of our discussion shall be the word.
When letters are used to form words, there are at least nine (9) different types of words that can be formed. That means that any word you form can be any of the nine (9) different types: nouns—boy, verbs—go, adjectives—slow, adverbs—slowly, pronoun—he, prepositions—under, conjunctions—and, articles—the, interjections—oh!.
Types of Words
There are different types of words. What we call types of words is what in school you have been taught to be parts of speech. They are nine (9) in number. In other words, when you form an English word, it will be at least one of the following.
i. Nouns
ii. Verbs
iii. Adverbs
iv. Adjectives
v. Pronouns
vi. Prepositions
vii. Conjunctions
viii. Articles/Determiners
ix. Interjections
For example, if you form the word read, that's a verb. How did I know that? I will tell you later. If on the other hand you form the word goat, that's a noun. Just how did I get that? Don't worry. I shall explain.
Nouns
A noun is the name of anything. I'm sure you can't forget that. Look around you. Just look around you. What do you see? Things—animate (animals) and inanimate (non-animals), and you can call call each of them by names, isn't it? That's an example of a noun. Whatever you can call a name is an example of a noun—hair, head, curtain, tree, dog, car, bag, Abuja, Nigeria. Look around your classroom and write out the names of five (5) things that you can see. When you get home, look around your house and write out the names of ten (10) things that you can see. You probably can mention the names of five (5) different places you have visited before, too. There are different types of nouns but that isn't our focus for now.
When I was much younger, my peers and I usually played a word game on nouns. You may wish to extend the letters to Z and play the game with your friends too. This is how to play it. Your friend will call a letter, for instance B and then the two of you will start racking your heads for names of persons, places, things, animals, countries that start with letter B. The time will only be up when your friend says to stop. There's no fixed time. It's when the person who called the turn finishes that the time will be up.
Persons Animals Things Places/Countries
A Abidal Antelope Axe. Angola
B
C
D
E
F
Pronouns
Something about pronouns is that they are used to replace nouns. Little wonder they are called pronouns anyway and not proadjectives or proadverb or even proverb! You may wish to know why they are used to replace nouns. It is to avoid boring and meaningless repetition. Let's consider the following examples:
Paul said Paul was at the party but Paul didn't stay too long because Paul was to be at another party of Paul's best friend.
Paul said he was at the party but he didn't stay too long because he was to be at another party of his best friend.
Which of the two examples would you prefer? You will mostly likely prefer the second example.
Examples of pronouns are
I—me—mine—myself
We—us—ours—ourselves
You—yours—yourself/yourselves
He/She/It—him/her/it —his/hers/its
They—them—theirs—themselves
The blogger, Olabanji O. odurombi, can be contacted for via SMS, Voice Call, WhatsApp on 08037699294.
The blogger has also authored the following books:
English Simplified!
A Text of English Sounds
Eku: A Corpus of Yoruba Greetings with Tales and Essays
Identifying Grammatical Names and Functions—e-book (Due for release)
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