Saturday, April 02, 2005
The ontology of etymology
Why not start out with a whopper: what is the relationship between a word’s form and the nature of what it names? Socrates was among the first to ponder this, according to Anatoly Liberman’s fascinating new book Word Origins and How We Know Them:
Socrates has great respect for wordsmiths and calls them lawgivers. A lawgiver suggests names that bring out the essence of the thing named. However, every word ... is not predestined to have the form we happen to know.
You can see why a Calvinist would perk up his ears at that postulation. Liberman concludes:
Let us admire Socrates who ... understood so much about language and repeat the watchword of etymological research: original ‘names’ were conventional (for other sounds could have expressed the same meaning) but not arbitrary (the speakers who chose those sounds had a reason to do so). The entire science of etymology is centered on finding that reason.