A name is a sound endowed with meaning (phone semantike) by convention (kata syntheken). (16a, 20–21)
Lo Piparo (2003) has proposed a radically different interpretation of this passage,26 but in the present instance we are concerned, not with the philological exegesis of Aristotle, but with seeing how the Middle Ages read this text; and the current interpretation was that what we have on the one hand are things, which impress their images upon the soul (which constitutes their species), while on the other we have the linguistic symbols (sonorous and graphemic) that refer to the affections of the soul, or mental images, ad placitum. But, if this is how the text is to be understood, we ought to draw another conclusion from it: that sounds and letters (independently of their meaning) are also indices (semeia) of the affections of the soul. An idea that may appear banal in itself (like saying that if someone speaks it is because they have something in their heads that they want to say), but which becomes less banal when we see the advantage that Thomas derives from it indirectly, when he lets it be understood that we do not recognize that man is a rational animal through direct knowledge of his essence, but because he manifests his rationality though language.
Boethius’s Latin translation, upon which medieval thinkers will base themselves, runs as follows (my emphasis):
Sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce, earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae; et ea quae scribuntur, eorum quae sunt in voce. Et quemadmodum nec litterae omnibus eaedem, sic nec eaedem voces; quorum autem hae primorum notae sunt, eaedem omnibus passiones animae sunt; et quorum hae similitudines, res etiam eaedem.…
Nomen ergo est vox significativa secundum placitum sine tempore, cuius pars est significativa separata … Secundum placitum vero, quoniam naturaliter nominum nihil est, sed quando fit nota; nam designant et inlitterati soni, ut ferarum, quorum nihil est nomen.27
Boethius, then, translates with the same word, nota, both of the Aristotelian terms, symbolon and semeion. What Aristotle meant to say was that the twofold relationship word/concept and letters of the alphabet/words is symbolic, or, as the Middle Ages will interpret it, is based on convention (and for this reason varies from one language to another), whereas the relationship between concept and thing is iconic.
But if we translate semeion with nota, and understand it to mean “sign” in the contemporary meaning of the word (the sense in which we also speak of a linguistic sign), what Aristotle appears to be saying is that words are symbols and signs of concepts, and that consequently the two terms are synonyms. In addition to leaving in abeyance the idea, previously referred to, that Aristotle was saying that the fact that words are spoken is an index, proof, or symptom of the fact that concepts exist in the mind of the speaker, it also leaves in abeyance the whole universe of indiciary signs, and in this sense it poses a number of serious problems that we will come to grips with in due time.
For the moment let us consider a telling example. When Aristotle says, in De interpretatione (16a 19–20, 26–29)—this at least was the way he was read in the Middle Ages—that a name is a vox significativa by convention, and that no sound is a name for natural reasons but is such only when it becomes, by convention, a symbol, he adds that inarticulate sounds, like those made by the beasts, manifest (delousi) something, though none of them is a name.
Aristotle does not say that the sounds made by the beasts signify or designate something, he says they manifest it, as a symptom makes manifest its cause. But the Middle Ages, as we shall see, has no trouble translating the Greek delousi with the Latin significant. Boethius’s translation, by rendering symbol and index with the same term nota, obliterated the distinction and favored their identification.28 But the Middle Ages will have no problem interpreting the sounds made by animals as voces significativae, even though not the same as nomina (and various commentators explain that in such cases Aristotle is not talking about voces but about soni, because not all animals, on account of the structure of their phonatory organs, can utter voces, and many simply produce sounds).29
The barking of the dog, which means that the dog is angry, appears in Boethius as an example of a vox significativa, though not ad placitum, but naturaliter: “canum latratus iram significat canum”—and, by the same token, voces naturaliter significativae are also the moans of the sick.30
And so, under the genus voces significativae we find a species that according to Aristotle should have belonged among the semeia. In this category, Boethius and those who follow him lump together, along with the barking of the dog, the gemitus infirmorum, the whinny of the horse and the sounds made by those animals that have no vox but have “tantum sonitu quodam concrepant.”31
Boethius assuredly understands that these voces signify naturaliter, because they evidently reveal their cause according to the (symptomatic) model of inference, but, having obfuscated the distinction between the doctrine of indices and the doctrine of names, he neglects an important fact: that natural sounds do not have an emitter, unless, as sometimes occurs in certain processes of divination, they are interpreted as if they had been emitted intentionally by a supernatural agent. The moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog, however, have an emitter, though we are not in a position to affirm that the emission was deliberate. But Boethius also singles out the whinny of the horse: “hinnitus quoque equorum sepe alterius equi consuetudinem quaerit,”32 when the horse whinnies to call another horse, and hence whinnies with a definite intention. In fact, in the same passage, Boethius says that “ferarum quoque mutorum animalium voces interdum aliqua significatione praeditas esse perspicimus.” We are dealing, then, with voces endowed with some meaning. But endowed by whom (before the advent of Abelard’s idea of an “active will”)? By the beast emitting them or by the human hearing them?
Figure 4.3
We can immediately see that the latratus canis (and all the other sounds animals make) may enjoy a double status: on the one hand the dog speaks to other dogs and on the other the dog speaks to humans. But in the second case, the alternative is still twofold: either humans understand the dog’s bark because they have acquired a habit that makes them apt at interpreting symptoms (like the sailor who has learned how to interpret the signs in the sky), or else humans have acquired a habit that makes them apt at interpreting the language the dog uses to talk to them. These are two distinct zoosemiotic problems (while yet another problem remains on the back burner: if and in what way the dog understands the language the human uses to address him).
We must conclude, then, that with Boethius a classification of voces is inaugurated which has two characteristics: it melds together the Stoic classification of signs (as voces significativae naturaliter) and the Aristotelian classification of voces (as nomina ad placitum), and it leaves in abeyance the problem of the intentionality of the utterance of the vox.
Consequently, this classification—consolidating a series of basically analogous positions taken by a number of authors, from Boethius to Peter of Spain, Lambert of Auxerre, Garland the Compotist, and others—would appear as in Figure 4.3.33
4.2.5. The Thomist Reading of De interpretatione 16a
Thomas Aquinas will not depart from this classification, though his taxonomy is more complex. Taking into account the remarks appearing passim in his commentary on the De interpretatione, whereas, at IV, 38 et seq., he seems to concern himself with a classification of the voces, reserving the appellation signum only for the voces significativae, in IV, 46, on the other hand, where he attempts to explain why Aristotle, in speaking of animal sounds, used the term soni and not voces (it was necessary, Thomas explains, to take into consideration the sounds of animals which, not being furnished with lungs, are not capable of uttering vocal sounds), he suggests the possibility of a more detailed classification, which considers the sonus as a genus.
The Aristotelian translation available to Thomas was not yet that of William of Moerbeke (who was shrewd enough to translate symbolon and semeion correctly as two distinct notions), but basically that of Boethius, whose Latin term for both semiotic phenomena is nota (which the commentary then proceeds to read as the equivalent of signum).
Bearing in mind the probable sources he was relying on,34 his classification could be summed up as in Figure 4.4.
This classification betrays a number of influences. In the first instance, along the lines of Saint Augustine, Thomas calls every meaningful vox a signum. But, in II, 19, he speaks of a signum also apropos of the military trumpet (tuba), which is evidently not a case of sonus vocalis. It would appear, then, that a signum for him was any case of meaningful utterance, vocal or nonvocal. But, having translated the two Aristotelian terms with signum = nota, he takes no account of the inferential nature of the Stoic semeia, ignores every
