Re: Looking at the Cratylus; was: nomothete

Thanks, Muke.  So is Eco wrong?  Who were the ones being "corrected" that
you mentioned in your last message?  I just posted a message where I queried
whether the use of Nomothete is a mistake, and that less learned people have
copied it, mistaking nomothete for onomaturge.  See below:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Muke Tever" <hotblack@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 8:24 AM
Subject: 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."
Yes, I still wonder about this.

> 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.
Yes, I understand the philosophical question, and I read the whole Cratylus
last night between twelve and two in the morning.  My question is rather
about the use of misuse of the word in Eco's writings, and those who quote
him.  Has nomothete come to mean, among those who use the Platonic theory as
it is given in Cratylus, a "true" giver of names?  If so, then I'm happy.
If Eco has just been sloppy, as he sometimes is, I'm not.  But it appears
that use of Nomothete to mean authorized name giver has been used prior to
Eco, and been corrected by other classicists, or that is what I took your
remark last night to mean.  Who was correcting whom? :)

comment?
Sally

Sally

>
> *Muke!
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