Some biological aspects of Aristotle's glottology

Abstract

Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B. C) was for a long time an authority on ancient grammatical theory. His formulations of word categories supplemented by abundant logical and rhetorical considerations, made foundations for traditional linguistic concepts of grammar. He dealt with these matters almost throughout all his life, leaning on the knowledge of his predecessors, especially Plato and other philosophers. The author of this paper states that there was yet another field of investigation important for Aristotle especially in last the 25 years of his life, which contributed to his grasp of human language. Those were his biological preoccupations, which resulted in the works Historia animalium, De generatione animalium, De Partibus animalium, Parva naturalia. In these books he separated himself from Plato's dualism, treating human being as part of the living world, after his thorough empirical research of the systems and functioning of more than 500 animal species he knew. In several titles he insists that there is language only in man (Tõ lógõ chrçtai mónoz tõn zõõn d anthrõpoz, De generatione animalium 7, 786 b 2). That is his own discovery. He analyzes the role and function of all the organs by which the language is produced: mouth, lips tongue, larynx, palate, nose, then stream of air, etc. Doing so, he formulates in fact an early type of phonetics. The author of the paper further indicates that this 'biological' knowledge of Aristotle's should be confronted and paralleled with his 'grammatical' formulations, which should lead to a more complete image of Aristotle's glottology, a theory of language in broader sense than linguistics of today. As for the physei - thései traditional division among ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle did not seem to care a lot, but one can conclude that Aristotle thought of language as being katà synthçkçn, i. e. of arbitrary nature.