Etymology And Magic Yaskas Nirukta Flatos Cratylus And Riddle Of Semanticetymologies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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Johannes Bronkhorst
Ermology and Magic
169
tums in the end against etymologies'. His train of thought runs as follows: "If a person asks about the words by means of which names are formed, and again about those by means of which those words were formed, and keeps on doing this indefinitely, he who answers his questions will at last give up... Now at what point will he be right in giving up and stopping? Will it not be when he reaches the names which are the elements of the other names and words? For these, if they are the elements, can no longer rightly appear to be composed of other names" (421d-422a). This gives rise to a question: "How can the earliest names, which are not as yet based upon any others, make clear to us the nature of things, so far as that is possible, which they must do if they are to be names at all?" (422d-e). The answer proposed by Socrates is that the name-maker grasps with his letters and syllables the reality of the things named and imitates their essential nature" (424a-b). Socrates admits that it will seem ridiculous that things are made manifest through imitation in letters and syllables" (425d); yet there is no alternative, unless we were to believe that the gods gave the earliest names, or that we got the earliest names from some foreign folk and the foreigners are more ancient than we are, or resort to some other evasive tactic (425d-e). Socrates therefore proceeds to assign meanings to individual letters, it would take us too far to give a detailed account of his results, but the principle is simple: the phonetic nature of a sound corresponds to the object it denotes, the active sound rho, for example, expresses activity. By combining these individual letters, the lawgiver makes by letters and syllables a name for each and every thing, and from these names he compounds all the rest by imitation (427c).
Having reached this far, Socrates discovers an insufficiency in the view propounded, which he uses as one of his arguments against it! "If the name is like the thing, the letters of which the primary names are to be formed must be by their very nature like the things" (434a). But not infrequently a word contains sounds which have no right to be there, such as the sound lambda, which expresses softness, in the word sklerótes "hardness' (434d). One might of course argue that this is an added sound which does not really belong in this word, but
this raises the question how it got there. The answer can only be 'by custom' or 'by convention, but this takes us back to the position which was intended to be refuted in the first place, viz., that the relationship between words and their objects is determined by convention. Socrates concludes: "I myself prefer the theory that names are, so far as is possible, like the things named; but really this attractive force of likeness is, as Hermogenes says, a poor thing, and we are compelled to employ in addition this commonplace expedient, convention to establish the correctness of names" (435c).
One of the things to be noted in this dialogue is the desire to identify the ultimate elements of language and their meanings. Indeed, Socrates tums against the position of Cratylus precisely because his attempt to connect the primary names with the things denoted does not succeed.
In contrasting the Cratylus with the Nirukra and with Indian etymologising in general, several important differences deserve our altention. It has already been pointed out that the Greeks did not look upon their language as the only true language. To this must be added that Plato speaks about words as having been created by a or several lawgivers with the dialectician as his supervisor": 390d), which is in total contrast with the Indian conception of things. Indeed, the grammarian Patanjali (introduced above) made the famous, and opposite. observation that no one who is in need of words would go to a grammarian the way someone in need of a pot goes to a potter to have one made. The idea of words being made by anyone, human or superhuman, was totally unacceptable in India. For Plato, on the other hand, it is fundamental. What is more, the original name-givers were no ordinary persons (401b), and the suggestion is made that he who gave the first names to things (here the singular is used) is more than human (438c). The name-givers are sometimes called demiourgos (43le), and it is not impossible that Plato looked upon the original name-giver as close to, or identical with, the Demiurge, the maker of this world mentioned in some other dialogues (esp. Timaeus). This link is particularly interesting in that it connects etymologising with cosmology, a connec
Milli.ed. Kieler, Bumbu XII 1885, w
Ip 7-8