Re: nomothete

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>


> Sally:
>> Can "nomothete" or "Nomothete" mean "name-giver" as well as "lawgiver"?
>> Umberto Eco seems to use this term with the latter sense:
>>
>> "...'out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and
>> every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would
> call
>> them'.  The interpretation of the passage is an extremely delicate
>> matter.
>> Clearly we are in the presence of a motif, common to other religions and
>> mythologies -- that of the nomothete, the name-giver, the creator of
>> language."
>>
>> Search for the Perfect Language, p. 8.
>>
>> Is Eco using the word incorrectly?  I've always understood this to mean
>> nomos + theticos.  Is there any context outside of Eco's use of it here
>> where this word means giving the name?
>
> Not as far as I know. Is there some kind of abstruse pun going on,
> between nomothete and onomatothete? Are these words for "law" and "name"
> cognate? And are Latin lex/legis (law) and Gk lexis/legein (words,
> speech, speak) [forgive me if in my haste my inflections err ...]
> cognate?
My questions exactly.  Is onomatothete an actual word?  Or onomathete?  Is
he confusing nomos with onoma?

**********
Who has heard of a Nomothete in the context Eco uses here?  Moses and the
ten commandments?  Aslan in _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ (when he
sings creation into being?)
**********

I can't imagine Eco making this kind of mistake (is there an Italian version
of the word?), and here I was quoting him, and thinking that we had another
word for glossopoeist, perhaps some kind of divine name-giver, but I was
thrown into doubt by all the dictionary definitions of this word when I
checked. If Eco screwed up here, I've lost a GREAT paragraph.

 -nomy, however, means not just a system of laws governing a specific field,
but also a body of knowledge concerning a specific field.  Nomos < *nem:
"assign, allot, take; Greek nemein, "to allot."  O-grade form *nom, yielding
Greek nomos: portion, usage, custom, law, division, district.

Then what is -thete?  "placer?" "doer"?  from Greek tithenai, "to put"?  The
IE dictionary gives reduplicative *dhi-dhe as the origin of this suffix in
such words as metathesis, synthesis, prosthesis, anathema, etc. Putting or
placing things into a district or a usage?

******
So what Adam is doing is actually apportioning the animals?  Placing animals
into categories?  (I'm hopeful of this last).  Giving laws to language and
names (even more hopeful)?  Eco seems to use the word to mean Adam's naming
the animals.
*******

I return to And's question: logos seems to mean in Greek both "law" and
"word."  Could nomos, too?  Did Eco mean logothete?  I looked that up, and
unfortunately it meant a petty accountant.

The IE root for L. lex ("law") is also the root for Gr. logos: *leg: "to
collect; with derivatives meaning to speak."  Could the same thing have been
going on with nomos/onoma?

Sally

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