University of Virginia Library

Plato. Plato's views on language are chiefly put forth
in his dialogue Cratylus. He discusses the relation
between words (rather: names, as Plato consistently
refers to the basic elements as onómata). Plato's view,
put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue, seems
to be that words may indeed to a certain extent give
a clue to the nature of reality, but that the guidance
they provide is very uncertain. Even if a name (ónoma)
was given at one time by the wisest of philosophers,
in full conformity with the nature of the thing, it is
later exposed to all the vicissitudes of chance and the
whims of ordinary speakers. Hence no safe conclusions
can be drawn from the etymology of the name to the
nature of the thing the name stands for. On the whole,
therefore, Plato's attitude towards the study of lan-
guage is rather unfavorable. Language does not, to him,
provide the key to the realm of true reality.

Before arriving at this somewhat negative conclu-
sion, however, Plato gives considerable attention to
two ideas which unfortunately have exerted a dis-
astrous influence on linguistic thought ever since. The
first is the idea that there is some inner fitness con-
necting the name and the thing it stands for. The
second concerns the way in which the fitness of the
name should be ascertained. Here Plato applies an
extremely loose and ad hoc method of etymologizing
in which (to use Voltaire's quip made two thousand
years later) the consonants counted for little and the
vowels for nothing at all. The reasoning is often so
ridiculously flippant that later commentators have as-
sumed that Plato really meant to hold up the method
to scorn. There is no doubt an element of playful irony
in some of the wilder flights of etymological fancy in
the dialogue. But though Plato certainly saw that the
etymological approach he exemplified so copiously
might be, and was, misused, it seems quite clear that
in principle he considered it a natural and valid way
of analyzing the meaning of a word. In any case, Plato's
etymologies in Cratylus set more or less the pattern
for Western scholars down to the beginning of the
nineteenth century.

Let us consider Plato's discussion of the name
“Poseidon”:

(fol. 402-03; Plato, Works, trans. of Vol.
IV, H. N. Fowler, London and Cambridge, Mass. [1926],
p. 169).

It will be seen that Plato is by no means dogmatic.
Not infrequently he is quite willing to accept the
possibility that several different derivations of a name
may all be considered as valid. The underlying as-
sumption is that names were consciously invented by
an original name-giver, who may well have had more
than one reason for a certain choice. The nearest
analogy to Plato's name-giver would in fact be a mod-
ern inventor of trade names, who indeed works on the
principle that the name should vaguely suggest those
ideas that he believes the customers ought to associate
with the product.

In his search for the smallest elements making up
the names, Plato also considers the idea of sound sym-
bolism. He finds that r should stand for swift move-
ments, l for softness, and i for smallness. But then, he
asks, how can we justify a word like sklērós (“hard”),
which contains an l, a sign for softness? In the end,
therefore, Plato arrives at the conclusion that it is futile
to try to discover the truth of things by analyzing the
names. That does not mean, however, that he con-
demns his previous argument altogether. It is only
when compared with the high standard of perfect
knowledge that the method of etymology falls short.
Plato would also argue that the kind of knowledge that
we get through our sensory organs is imperfect, com-
pared with the ideal knowledge that purely intellectual
contemplation gives.

In the controversy that occupied the Greeks so
much, as to whether language was the product of thésis
(“convention”, another term was nómos “order”) or
phúsis (“nature”), Plato therefore seems to have taken
a middle position. Though he concludes that the
meanings of names are in large part determined by
custom or convention, he seems to look upon this as
due either to corruption or to the ignorance of the
name-givers. Most of his discussion is carried on with
the assumption that, at least in an ideal language, there
is a fundamental fitness connecting the name with the
thing. Such an idea leads to confusing the form and
the content of the linguistic sign, and was to form the
basis of both weak linguistics and bad metaphysics.

More important, however, is the fact that Cratylus
gave its sanction to such a disastrous pattern for analyz-
ing words. It is not only that the majority of the ety-
mologies are wrong, if considered as statements of word
history or derivation. The worst of it is that the method
as such was perverse. By allowing sounds to be
changed, dropped, or added in a perfectly haphazard
way, in order to make a suggested etymology fit, one
gave up in advance the possibility of finding a consis-

tent pattern of word-formation in the language. It may
have been this cavalier attitude towards sound changes
in words that prevented the Greeks—and the Romans—
from making consistent use of such a fundamental
distinction as that between stem and ending, between
root and affix. The Sanskrit grammarians did immensely
better in this respect. It must be admitted, though, that
the Greek language is unusually intractable to ety-
mology. Indeed, it may even be said to favor the kind
of analysis where sounds can be exchanged without
limit. The declension and conjugation systems provide
examples of almost every sort of change. We find the
“addition” of letters in gígās, gen. gígantos “giant”;
ónoma, gen. onómatos “name”. We find “loss” of letters
in kúōn, gen. kunós “dog”; and alteration of vowels
as in hēdús, gen. hēdéos “sweet.” Finally the verbal
system yields a rich harvest: gígnomai “I am born,”
gegénēmai, gégona “I was born.” It was not easy to
discover any organizing principle in such a variable
material.