Re: Looking at the Cratylus; was: nomothete

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004 01:40:02 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
> Socrates: Ouk ara pantos andros, O Ermogenes, onoma thesthai, alla tinos
> onomatourgon outos d'estin, os eolken, o nomothetus, os de ton demiourgon
> spaniotatos en anthropois gignetai.
> "Then it is not for every man, Hermogenes, to give names (onoma thesthai),
> but for him who may be called the name-maker (onomatourgon); and he, it
> appears, is the lawgiver (nomothetus), who is of all the artisans among men
> the rarest."
>
> (This seems like an argument for prescriptive grammarians!)
>
> What this tells me is that the Greek word for lawgiver has become conflated
> or confused with onomatourgon, simply because of the identification of the
> lawgiver with the namegiver.  But technically, nomothete is "law-giver" and
> "onomatothete" or "onomatourge"  is "namegiver."
I'm reading through the Perseus version text online here, and it seems to me
that while Hermogenes believes (with modern linguists, apparently) that "no
name belongs to any particular thing by nature, but only by the habit [= Greek
ethos] and custom [= nomos] of those who employ it and who established the usage,"
Socrates is trying to tell him further that it isn't just to anyone who can
establish a word's usage:  it may be that anyone can create a word, or call
horses "men" and men "horses", but only the nomothete (the one who can
establish _nomos_) can be called a skilled onomaturge.


	*Muke!
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