CRATYLUS

The problem of the origin of language – whether it arose and developed naturall or was a conscious human creation – is generally taken to have first been raised by unknown (to us) sophists in the fifth century BCE. It is already the opening question in Plato's Cratylus, without any need of explanation. The Stoics maintained that the very basic sounds of human speech were natural, but the more complex words and concepts were created by 'the ancients', on philosophical grounds, and etymological studies were conducted by them to reveal the 'real meaning' of some of the most important concepts in what we would call cosmology and theology. In developing such etymologies, and in the general meaning they gave them, the Stoics did not differ all that much from what Socrates of the dialogue does in Cratylus; but as usual, they incorporated them, and the approach behind them, into their system.