For example, Hindi and Urdu are both closely related, mutually intelligible Hindustani languages (one being sanskritised and the other arabised).
However, they are favored as separate languages by Hindus and Muslims respectively, as seen in the context of Hindu-Muslim conflict resulting in the violence of the 1947 Partition of India.
Elucidating the connections between language (especially names and nouns), meaning, and the way we perceive the world has provided a rich field of study for philosophers and linguists.
Maintenance of this system involves formal rules of nomenclature and periodic international meetings of review.
Ethnobiology frames this interpretation through either "utilitarianists" like Bronislaw Malinowski who maintain that names and classifications reflect mainly material concerns, and "intellectualists" like Claude Lévi-Strauss who hold that they spring from innate mental processes.
[16] Folk classification is defined by the way in which members of a language community name and categorize plants and animals whereas ethnotaxonomy refers to the hierarchical structure, organic content, and cultural function of biological classification that ethnobiologists find in every society around the world.
[16]: 14 Ethnographic studies of the naming and classification of animals and plants in non-Western societies have revealed some general principles that suggest pre-scientific man's conceptual and linguistic method of organising the biological world in a hierarchical way.
[21][22] The levels, moving from the most to least inclusive, are: In almost all cultures objects are named using one or two words equivalent to 'kind' (genus) and 'particular kind' (species).
[13] When made up of two words (a binomial) the name usually consists of a noun (like salt, dog or star) and an adjectival second word that helps describe the first, and therefore makes the name, as a whole, more "specific", for example, lap dog, sea salt, or film star.
The meaning of the noun used for a common name may have been lost or forgotten (whelk, elm, lion, shark, pig) but when the common name is extended to two or more words much more is conveyed about the organism's use, appearance or other special properties (sting ray, poison apple, giant stinking hogweed, hammerhead shark).
It seems reasonable to assume that the form of scientific names we call binomial nomenclature is derived from this simple and practical way of constructing common names—but with the use of Latin as a universal language.
Human personal names, also referred to as prosoponyms,[30] are presented, used and categorised in many ways depending on the language and culture.
In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming suffixes ('-ness', '-ity', '-tion') to adjectives or verbs e.g. "happiness", "serenity", "concentration."
This could include names of mountains, rivers, seas, villages, towns, cities, countries, planets, stars etc.
Moreover, the precision demanded by science in the accurate naming of objects in the natural world has resulted in a variety of codes of nomenclature (worldwide-accepted sets of rules on biological classification).
[37][38] Doing taxonomy entails identifying, describing,[39] and naming taxa;[40] therefore, in the scientific sense, nomenclature is the branch of taxonomy concerned with the application of scientific names to taxa, based on a particular classification scheme, in accordance with agreed international rules and conventions.
The IUPAC nomenclature is a system of naming chemical compounds and for describing the science of chemistry in general.