2. •Without the greeks of the fifth and fourth
centuries bc western civilisation as we know it
today would be unimaginable. It was the
greeks who laid the foundations of virtually all
the scholarly disciplines cultivated up to the
renaissance – grammar, rhetoric, dialectic,
arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy,
not to mention philosophy, literary criticism
and medicine – as well as of almost all the
literary genres practised to this day.
3. • The Greeks were the first Europeans to study
language systematically, and not only that: they
identified many of the issues which have occupied
linguists down to the present day – the origin of
language, the nature of the linguistic sign, the
relationship between language, thought, and
reality, and that between sound and meaning, the
causes of language change, and the analysis and
description of linguistic structure.
4. • It is extraordinary that in the space of three
generations a small group of people could set
the agenda for much of the subsequent
intellectual history of the west, and of western
linguistics in particular. How did this come
about? Why were the Greeks so different from
their predecessors? The Greek way of looking at
language follows naturally from their newly
emerging world outlook, and that outlook was
very different from anything that had previously
existed.
5. •A. The Greeks ( 5th c bc)
the ancient Greeks were the pioneers in field of investigation of language; they
studied Greek exclusively and show little interest – or none – to the other existing
languages at that period. The most prominent Greek philosophers who studied it
were plato, aristotle and socrates. Each of them developed interesting ideas about
language; however, they speculated about them.
One famous example of their speculation concerned the nature and origin of
language.
6. •The question debated was “is language due to physis [nature] or to namos
[naming]?” In other terms, is language governed by nature, which is physis,
as any other natural phenomenon like the falling of rain, or is it the result of
a social convention (agreement) that is nomes.
Those who supported the first point of view were called the naturalists
whereas the other group was called the conventionalists.
7. •Plato: among the naturalists, there was the famous philosopher
plato. Cratylus (ancient greek: kratulos) is the name of a dialogue
plato wrote. In the dialogue, socrates is asked by two men, cratylus
and hermogenes, to tell them whether names are « conventional »
or « natural », that is, whether language is a system of arbitrary
signs or whether words have an intrinsic relation to the things they
signify.
