History of Philosophy: Philosophy of Language
The philosophy of language focuses on the nature of language, how language, language users, and the world are interrelated, and investigates the 'nature of meaning, indexicality, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought' and predates the 'systemic descriptions of grammar which emerged c. [circa, or about] the 5th century BC in India and c. the 3rd century BC in Greece'. The early history of the philosophy of language overlaps with the early history of linguistics, which is the 'scientific study of language, involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context' so has many overlaps with the philosophy of language.
The earliest evidence of people studying philosophy of language are records of debate over the phrasing of ritual texts and arguments, with the oldest being written in cuneiform in the early 2nd millennium BCE in the southern part of Mesopotamia, beginning a tradition that continued more than 2,500 years. The texts were a list of Sumerian nouns, which was a language unrelated to any known language, and was used for religious and legal texts at the time. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian for everyday usage, but Sumerian was still considered a prestige and religious language, so it needed to be taught to those who didn't speak it natively, including translation lists of not just words, but for paradigms of a word with one text giving 227 forms of the verb Äar, which means in its simplest form 'to place'.
In ancient India, religious texts were also the inspiration for the development of the philosophy of language. The Vedic texts needed to be recited and interpreted correctly, with the oral version of these texts becoming standardized by 1200 BCE, along with 'treatises on ritual recitation [that] suggest splitting up the Sanskrit compounds into words, stems, and phonetic units, providing an impetus for morphology and phonetics'. The grammarian PÄį¹ini, who lived during the 6th century BCE, wrote a description of the rules of Sanskrit known as Aį¹£į¹ÄdhyÄyÄ«. He wrote in a time when oral transmission was the norm, so the work can be recited 'end-to-end in two hours', preferring 'brevity over clarity', though it notes 'some features specific to the older Vedic form of the language as well as certain dialectical features current in the author's time. Another grammarian, YÄska, who lived sometime between about the 7th-5th century BCE, wrote that 'word meanings are derived based on sentential usage', or how they are used in a sentence, positing four categories, nouns, verbs, pre-verbs, or prefixes, and particles/invariants, maybe prepositions, proposing a 'test for nouns both concrete and abstract: nouns are words which can be indicated by the pronoun that'.
The ancient Greeks developed their alphabet from the Phoenician symbols, adding symbols for vowels and consonant sounds that the Phoenicians didn't have, giving them a full alphabet. The Phoenician and earlier Greek writing systems were what is known as an abjad, where the symbols represent syllables, a combination of a consonant and a vowel. This addition resulted in the ability to write poetry, such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. This also became the basis of philology, which is the 'study of language in oral and written historical sources', as there were several versions of the Homeric poems and commentaries were written on them. They began studying the nature and origins of language as early as Plato, debating 'whether language was man-made, a social artifact, or supernatural in origin', with Plato taking the position that meaning comes from a natural process, not related to the language or the user. He felt that conventionalism, which is the idea that 'principles of a certain kind are grounded on agreements in society, rather than on external reality', was wrong because anything can be given any name, there can't be correct or incorrect names, but there's a wrongness to calling someone by a name, such as Theophilus, which means god-beloved, when they are impious. Plato felt that the 'primitive (as opposed to derived) names have a natural correctness, because each phoneme represents basic ideas or sentiments; for example, the letter Ī» [lambda] and its sound representāfor Platoāthe idea of smoothness or softness. However, by the end of Cratylus, he seems to admit that some social conventions are also involved, and that the idea that phonemes have individual meanings is not without flaws'. The Stoics 'distinguished five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles' as well as developing an understanding of the proposition of a sentence, that is 'the meanings of declarative sentences, objects of beliefs, and bearers of truth values' which explains how sentences in different languages can have the same meaning, or even how differently phrased sentences in the same language can have the same meaning.
In ancient China, philosophers followed the same path as Indian philosophers did, with the philosophy of language beginning as an aid to understanding an older form of the language, emerging in the 3rd century BCE during the Western Han dynasty. Before this, Confucius, who lived from about 551-479 BCE, thought about the 'relationship between names and reality', emphasizing the 'moral commitment implicit in a name, (zhengming) stating that the moral collapse of the pre-Qin was a result of the failure to rectify behaviour to meet the moral commitment inherent in names', such as each person fulfilling the role they have: king, minister, father, son.
