Review of Cratylus (ca. 385–360 BCE)
Plato (writer).
Read in 2026.
Read in Benjamin Jowett’s English translation.
The fitness of names, from proper nouns down to individual phonemes.
A good example of ancient philosophy being shockingly advanced. In Plato’s depiction, Socrates has a basic awareness of the development of languages, going so far as to suppose that a still-more ancient form of the Greek language, though more closely connected to the origins of its words (etymology), would have been ugly to him. I love that. He dithers on the question of whether the phonemes are truly musical in their onomatopoeia, and many of his teleological speculations are surely wrong, but they are not ridiculous. Ferdinand de Saussure and Gérard Genette did not have to make a radical departure from Cratylus to dispose of Plato’s primitive idealism and replace it with the foundations of modern linguistics and semiotics.