Imposition of Words in Stoicism and Late Ancient Grammar and Philosophy

Abstract

Ancient thinkers agreed that words have received their meanings by an institution, a θέσις, but they disagreed about the extent to which the choice of sounds to represent a given thing was at the discretion of the person instituting the name. The Stoics clearly thought that generally ‟name-setters” had aimed at creating words that were somehow suggestive of the things signified, but the article argues that they did not assume an initial stage in which all the words of a given language were ideally suited to their function, aberrations (‟anomaly”) in contemporary usage being due to a process of decay. Rather, they assumed that word-creation is a continuous process, driven by the needs or ordinary people, and only co-ordinated to some extent by their common rationality, this being the reason for the insufficient systematicity they discovered in the standard Greek of their day and tried to remedy by means of a rigorously systematic nomenclature of their own.

Keywords

• Stoics
• language
• names
• etymology
• anomaly
• nature