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.
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