We’ve been talking about Isidore of Seville, writer of
encyclopedias. Where did Isidore, a humble priest, or even a slightly less
humble bishop, get all of his information, and why was he so concerned about
etymologies (i.e., origins) of words?
Well, Isidore was extremely well read. He liked to read, he
had access to the classics (mostly the Roman classics), he had a good memory,
and he liked to take notes when he read. His memory and his notes were the
basis of the Etymologies. And why
etymology? Many classical and medieval scholars, going back to Plato’s Cratylus, believed that words had a
specific relationship to their meaning. They believed that words just didn’t
evolve by happenstance, but that the sound of the word originated as a result
of the word’s meaning. Isidore followed this tradition, and believed that
important knowledge comes from studying the original meanings of words. He felt
that it more important to study the origins of words than the things that they
stood for.
While this seems pretty archaic, modern scholars have not
completely dismissed this idea. For example, Padraic Monaghan of Lancaster
University in England and a group of researchers argued in an article published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2014
that the sound to meaning relationship in English is more systematic than would
be expected by chance. They also argued that “this systematicity is more
pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and less
so in later vocabulary development.”
As a result, they concluded that English vocabulary is “structured
to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language
acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order
to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.”
Pretty interesting stuff. Maybe Isidore and Plato were on to
something.
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