Re: Looking at the Cratylus; was: nomothete

Sally, I have a hunch that Eco may be drawing from Genette's
_Mimologies_ (really ought to have been called _Mimetologies_,
imo), but don't have ready access tonight to a copy to check.
This pointer may be a wildgoosechase, mind.

--And.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: [CONLANG] 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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> > LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
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> >
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> > http://wiki.frath.net/
> >
>