 The character mingnames really includes all words. Grammatically, Chinese common nouns share more features with proper names and one-place predicates (transitive verbs and adjectives) than do familiar Indo-European nouns. Chinese common nouns lack case and gender markings and Chinese grammar requires no grammatical noun-verb agreement. Like mass nouns, Chinese common nouns do not undergo pluralization and can stand alone as noun phrases. For related reasons, Chinese analysis postulated no substance-attribute structure to adjective-noun relations. So the translation ‘name’ is not inept nor is the ancient Chinese theory assumption that all words name the part of reality which the word “picks out”—roughly “naming” what we think of as its denotation or scope. Thus ‘white’ is a name and ‘horse’ is a name. Each names a region or part of the world. 