2014年6月11日星期三

Another Short History of Linguistics (29)

But later, when the human’s mind getting complex, people remember that their ancestor have a different arrangement to classify words.
When it came the time of Aristotle, he found the different between alphabet and semantics he wanted do something better than semantics, so he invented the ontology. We have to say ontology is not semantics. Semantics is similar what the Cartel said meaning alphabet, while ontology want all words start from one substance. It is impossible. If it is possible then there would be no language issue.
Yet why Aristotle made such impossible suggestion?
The question started from earlier age philosopher Thales. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_philosophy: Thales of Miletus, regarded by Aristotle as the first philosopher, held that all things arise from water. It is not because he gave a cosmogony that John Burnet calls him the “first man of science,” but because he gave a naturalistic explanation of the cosmos and supported it with reasons. According to tradition, Thales was able to predict an eclipse and taught the Egyptians how to measure the height of the pyramids.
Why he intended looking for the reason of cosmos? We know, every idea happened in necessary. What is the necessary of him to think about the basic element of the universe? My explanation is from linguistics. At his time, the Greece culture is an inferior one comparing with the Egyptian and Sumerian. Both of them are pictogram. In that case, what worried about for Thales was the survival of an alphabetic language. He knew pictogram very well. And he knew that every symbol of pictogram was based from physical substance, while alphabetic language couldn’t have such relationship with the physical world. So if the alphabetic language wanted to survival, it must find out a new way to expression the world. That is metaphysics.  Or we may say that once the alphabetic language could express the world not by visual sense directly but by an abstract metaphysic world, then all the benefit of pictogram will disappeared and only in this way the alphabetic language could be survival finally. The original intention is looking for a new way for the alphabetic expression, but hit the mark by a fluke that is the beginning of science.     

Teaching Egyptians how to measure the height of the pyramids is but a show off. For there are so many easier way to measure the height of pyramid, why he use the shadow of sun? For the sun is the god of Egyptian, and if he can use their god to do something that may rise his social status. As for predict an eclipse, it was impossible for him with poor knowledge of the astronomy.

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