Another book to influence him was Plato’s Cratylus. Before he had studied the Cratylus Rabelais worked within the standard linguistic ideas of Aristotle: to speak is natural, but no language is natural. Except for onomatopoeias, words are sounds on to which meanings have been arbitrarily imposed. For Plato in the Cratylus words are more complex. Onomatopoeias, for Plato as for Aristotle, convey their sense in their sound, but the ‘true’ meaning of some words is to be sought in their etymologies. (Etymology involved seeking out the etymon, the word’s true meaning.) In the roots of at least some
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