Latest essays
Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar (1660) — the Wager That the Shape of Language Copies the Shape of the Mind
At the convent of Port-Royal outside Paris, the theologian Arnauld and the grammar teacher Lancelot wrote a small book. Instead of listing the usages of a single language, they tried to derive the one rational grammar behind all languages from the operations of the mind. The parts of speech, the essence of the verb, the hidden sentences — all of it is a copy of the mind's acts of conceiving and judging. The whole picture, from the French, with plain diagrams.
Will There Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow? — Future Contingents and Determinism
Is 'there will be a sea battle tomorrow' already true or false? If so, everything about tomorrow happens of necessity, and deliberation and preparation are pointless. De Interpretatione chapter 9, the most debated chapter in the history of logic. Aristotle's answer: the whole disjunction is necessary; neither disjunct is yet determined.
Affirmation and Negation, Universal and Particular — the Origin of the 'Square of Opposition'
'Every man is white' and 'no man is white' cannot both be true, but can both be false. 'Every man is white' and 'some man is not white' must have exactly one true and one false. The relations Aristotle set out in chapter 7 became the medieval 'square of opposition' — and in modern logic part of it collapses.
Truth Lives Only in the 'Assertion' — a Prayer Is Outside Logic
'It is raining' comes out true or false. 'May it rain' is neither. Aristotle takes only the sentences that carry truth — assertions (apophantikos) — as the business of logic, and sends prayers, commands and questions off to rhetoric and poetics. The unit called 'the proposition' is born here.
Noun and Verb — the Verb 'Co-Signifies' Time
'Health' is a noun; 'is healthy' is a verb. What is the difference? For Aristotle, a verb signifies, and on top of that co-signifies 'being now' — time — and is always a sign of something 'said of another.' The two parts that build a sentence, and the puzzle of the 'is' that joins them, read from the Greek.
'By Convention' — Aristotle's Answer to Cratylus
Into the definition of the noun Aristotle slips one phrase — 'by convention.' No name exists by nature. The cries of animals express something naturally, but they are not names. To the pair of options Plato held open, his student rules for nomos — and it becomes the mainstream for two thousand years.
Reading Aristotle's De Interpretatione — Words Are 'Symbols by Convention,' and Truth Lives Only in the Sentence
To the question Plato left open — is a name natural or conventional? — his student Aristotle gives a short answer: words are symbols by convention. And truth and falsity live not in words but in the 'assertion,' where words are combined. Book II of the Organon, a dense essay in fourteen chapters, read from the Greek.
No Truth Is Learned from Names — the End of the Cratylus and the Theory of Forms
Having conceded that imitation in sound is not enough to make a name, Socrates brings convention back into the argument. Then he strikes at the heart of the nature view: the first name-giver had no names to work from. So knowledge sits prior to names. The dialogue closes by stepping toward an unchanging 'beautiful itself.'
A Name Is 'Vocal Imitation' — ρ for Motion, λ for Smoothness
How does a 'primary name,' one that cannot be broken down further, stand for its object? Socrates's answer is imitation in sound. ρ, because the tongue vibrates, stands for motion; λ, because the tongue slips, for smoothness — the first theory of sound symbolism in the West, and the very opponent Saussure would name and reject 2,300 years later.
The Flood of Etymologies — a Name Carries a Theory (and Is This a Joke?)
In the central section, more than half the dialogue, Socrates takes some 140 names of gods, virtues and natural things and breaks them into etymologies. Almost all of them contain 'flow' and 'motion.' The first name-givers, he suggests, built a Heraclitean worldview of universal flux into the names — and it is never clear whether the long performance is earnest or a joke.
A Name Is a 'Tool' — the Shuttle, and the Lawgiver Who Makes Names
As a weaver's shuttle divides the threads, a name is a tool that divides the being of things and teaches it. So who makes the tool — the 'rarest of craftsmen,' the lawgiver. And who uses the finished name and judges it? The dialectician.
Physis or Nomos — Two Positions on the 'Correctness' of Names
Hermogenes says: call a thing whatever you like, and that is its right name. Socrates dismantles this — things have a being you cannot set by decree, and 'naming' is likewise an action that can be done well or badly. But this is not yet a win for Cratylus's nature view. The dialogue applies the fifth-century 'nature or custom' debate to language.
Reading Plato's Cratylus — Is a Name Natural or Conventional? The West's First Philosophy of Language
Is the name of a thing fixed by nature (physis), or is it just a convention (nomos)? In the fourth century BC, Plato built a whole dialogue on that one question — the first sustained philosophy of language in the West. Socrates and two disputants, read from the Greek.
A Typology of Languages, and the Problem of "Ranking" — from Humboldt to Sapir
Isolating, agglutinating, inflecting, incorporating. This map of languages by structure begins with Humboldt. But he placed inflecting languages at the top. How the twentieth century, and Sapir, took that ranking apart.
The Organ That Forms Thought, and the Speech That Lives in Dialogue
A word is not an imprint of the object but of the image the object produces in the soul. And language is not made by one person alone — "I" already contains "thou." Humboldt on language and thought, language and the other.
Infinite Use of Finite Means — the Source of Generative Grammar
From a limited stock of sounds, words and rules, a speaker makes an unbounded number of sentences never uttered before. In 1966 Chomsky put Humboldt's phrase at the head of "the creative aspect of language use." What was carried on, and what was left.
Worldview — a Language Draws a Circle Around a People
"Every language draws a circle around the people to whom it belongs." But Humboldt also wrote that the circle is not a prison — to learn a foreign language is to gain a new standpoint. The source of linguistic relativity, from the German.
Inner Form — a Language's "Shape" Is Neither Its Sounds nor Its Rules
In Sanskrit the elephant is "the twice-drinker," "the two-tusked," "the one with a hand." One object, three concepts. A language presents not objects but ways of grasping them — Humboldt's "form," from the German.
Energeia — Language Is Not a Thing but an Act
What sits in the dictionary is not language. For Humboldt, the reality of a language is "the ever-repeated labour of the mind" — the act of speaking itself. The most-quoted passage of On the Diversity, from the German.
Reading Humboldt's On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) — Language Is Not a Product but an Activity
Eighty years before Saussure's Course, eighty-five before Sapir's Language, general linguistics began here. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote it up to his death; it appeared posthumously. Energeia, inner form, worldview, "infinite use of finite means" — the frame of the book, from the German.
Following a Rule, and the Private Language Argument
Continue the series by "+2." Any way of going on can be made to "accord" with the rule under some interpretation. So what holds the rule up? The hardest stretch of the Investigations, from the German.
Family Resemblance — "Don't Think, But Look!"
What is the essence common to "games"? Wittgenstein does not answer; he gives an order — look. No one fibre runs the whole length of the thread; there are only overlapping strands. Investigations §65–71, which reshaped how we think about categories.
Language-Games and "Meaning Is Use"
Is "Slab!" a name or an order? Starting from the language of a building site, Wittgenstein takes apart the plain picture that "words are names of things." The first half of the Investigations, from the German.
"Whereof One Cannot Speak" — The Limits of Language
The most-quoted sentence in twentieth-century philosophy, Tractatus proposition 7. But it is not mysticism for its own sake — it is a conclusion that falls out of the picture theory. What can be said, and what is only "shown"?
The Picture Theory — "A Proposition Is a Picture of Reality"
In a Paris courtroom, a traffic accident is re-enacted with dolls and toy cars. Wittgenstein saw in that model the secret of the proposition. Why can a model say how the accident went? The first half of the Tractatus, from the German.
Wittgenstein on Language — From the Picture to the Language-Game
A philosopher who published only one book in his lifetime, then took that book apart himself. The early Tractatus and its "picture theory," and the late Investigations and "meaning is use" — read from the German.
Value and Difference — "In a Language There Are Only Differences"
French mouton can have the same meaning as English sheep, but not the same value — because English also has mutton. The most radical chapter of the Course, read from the French.
Synchrony and Diachrony — a Language as a Present-Tense System, or as a Current
A position in chess is free of the moves that produced it. Saussure split language into two axes. Read alongside Sapir's "drift" — the other answer to the same divide.
The Arbitrary Sign — Why a Tree Can Just as Well Be Baum or Arbre
There is no inner tie between the idea "sister" and the run of sounds s—ö—r. Saussure's first principle, read from the 1916 French original.
Language and Literature — What Translates and What Does Not (Sapir, Chapter 11)
"With Heine one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German." Literature is made of a language as its material. The layer that translates and the layer that does not, and prosody as an outcrop of a language's dynamics — the last chapter of Language.
From the Sound Pattern to the Phoneme — Sapir's Chapter 3, and What Came After
Not one English speaker in a hundred knows that the t of 'sting' is a different sound from the t of 'teem.' Behind the objective sounds is a system in the mind — and how Sapir's insight became the phoneme.
Language, Race and Culture Are Separate — Sapir's Argument
"A racial genius that fashions a language" is a myth. Race, language and culture are independent variables — Sapir carrying his teacher Boas's anthropology over to the side of language, in chapters 9–10 of Language.
Sapir's "Drift" — a Language Moves Down Time and Has Its Own Slope
"Whom" will be gone in a couple of centuries, Sapir predicted. Not the fluctuations of one speaker but an unconscious selection that piles up in one direction — that is drift. A close reading of chapters 7–8 of Language.
Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 2: Form, Meaning, and Why Languages Have No Rank
By what methods is a word built? How many kinds of meaning hide in 'the farmer kills the duckling'? And why should we throw away the ladder that lines languages up from 'isolating' to 'inflective'? Sapir's chapters 4–6.
Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 1: Is Speech an Instinct, and What Is a Sound?
How does walking differ from talking? Can a cry become a word? With Hokusai's Fuji beside Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire, a plain walk through Sapir's chapters 1–3: the definition of language, the myth of 'organs of speech', and the pattern behind the sounds.
Reading Edward Sapir's Language (1921) — Speech Is Neither Instinct Nor Race
Five years after Saussure's Course, the anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote his own introduction to linguistics. Language is culture, not instinct; its essence is pattern, not sound; and a language drifts on its own. The book's core, with quotations and plain diagrams.
Japanese Fundamentals in the Opening of Kawabata's Snow Country
"Coming out through the long border tunnel, one was in the snow country." Four paragraphs that begin with a subjectless sentence, read against the basics: subject ellipsis, wa/ga, head-final order, -te ita, and a moving point of view.
Learning Long Japanese Sentences Through Mori Ōgai’s The Abe Family
Its opening sentence runs for more than 150 Japanese characters, yet its skeleton is simple: ‘As for Hosokawa Tadatoshi— a courier is dispatched.’ Particles, relative clauses, connectives, and predicate chains show us how to unpack it.
Mori Ōgai's Appendix to "The Origin of Language" — the 19th-century debate on where words come from
Does the cry become language? The interjectional ("pooh-pooh"), onomatopoetic ("bow-wow") and mama-papa theories, as Ōgai carried them into Japanese in 1889 — Herder, Grimm, Max Müller, quoted and unpacked.
Learning Japanese Prose from the First Sentence of Sōseki's Kokoro
"I always called that person Sensei." — twenty-three morae, one clause, one predicate. The craft of withholding a name, the focus slot before the verb, the triple work of -te ita, and the de aru register. Learning from the masters, part two.
Langage, Langue, Parole — Why Saussure Split "Language" in Three
The most famous distinction in the Course, quoting the French original: the speaking-circuit, "1 + 1 + … = 1", and the symphony.
Basic Japanese Grammar in Three Sentences from Mishima's The Sound of Waves
The same three sentences, this time from the ground up: the predicate comes last, particles are tags stuck onto words, description goes before the noun — all set against English.
Reading Japanese Narration in the Opening of Mishima's The Sound of Waves
Dissect the three sentences that open the novel — not with a person but with a place — and the skeleton of Japanese narration shows through: head-final order, the wa/ga alternation, the nominal predicate.
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 2: How the System Works, and How It Changes
A word's meaning is fixed by its difference from its neighbours. Synchrony and diachrony, value as difference, syntagmatic and associative relations, then sound change, analogy and waves — with everyday examples.
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 1: What Language Is, and What a Sign Is
Language is not a list of names for things. A slower walk through the line Saussure drew between langue and parole, and the idea that a sign is a concept joined to a sound.
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics: An Overview
Langue and parole, the arbitrary sign, synchrony and diachrony, value as difference — an overview of the lectures that reshaped how the twentieth century thought about language.
Saussure and the Birth of Linguistics
Reading the background of Course in General Linguistics and its opening survey of linguistic history.
What Are Words?
Language lives within us, yet comes from others. An inquiry into the mysterious network connecting self and other.