#andreas t zanker

[aboutanancientenquiry]

"Verbs and nouns of meaning in ancient Greek and Latin are polysemous, just as in the case of the English verb “to mean". Andreas T. Zanker considers how the ancient vocabulary could be used in different ways and investigates its development over time. In the first part of the book, Zanker argues for the role of metaphorical and metonymical transference in the creation of expressions of meaning; Greek and Roman authors used the same verbs to describe what inanimate things, including words and texts, meant/signified as they did of human beings in the act of meaning/signifying something. In the second part of the book, the author focuses on certain metaphorical extensions of this vocabulary and argues that they have implications for modern discussions of meaning, particularly in literary criticism."

[aboutanancientenquiry]

"Appendix I: Expressions of Inanimate Signification in Herodotus

p. 212-224

1 This book has of necessity been broad in range, and one thing that it clearly lacks is a case study of an individual author’s usage. This is due to my overall goal – to demonstrate the development of the vocabulary of meaning rather than to perform a synchronic analysis of its status at any single point in time. While certain authors have been mentioned piecemeal throughout, it will be useful to provide a study of an individual’s writing for the sake of comparison. Herodotus is in many ways an ideal subject for such an investigation: his history represents the first monolithic block of prose by an identifiable author to come down to us from antiquity, and so serves as one benchmark, at least, against which to measure earlier and subsequent usage.1 As such, it constitutes an important body of evidence for the process that I describe in Chapter 5, and provides a pendant to the writing of Plato, who has featured prominently in the preceding pages. Moreover, Herodotus engages with questions of signification with great frequency, and we might expect his vocabulary of meaning to be correspondingly rich.

2 The topic of signification in Herodotus has received much attention in recent years. Gregory Nagy has devoted a number of pages to the verb “σηµαίνειν” in Herodotus’ writing, particularly as we see it used in the first person: according to Nagy, the verb frequently implies that someone is communicating ���from a metaphorically superior vantage point” and thus connotes a certain authority on the part of the individual transmitting the sign – be it a god, a poet, or Herodotus himself.2 Lorenzo Miletti, in his discussion of metalanguage in Herodotus, has considered the ways in which verbs such as “καλεῖν” and “δύνασθαι” were used to translate lexical terms from one language to another.3 Alexander Hollmann has provided lexicographical detail on further words in Herodotus that relate to communication and decoding, such as the verbs “φράζειν”, “λαµβάνειν”, “συµβάλλεσθαι”, “ἐννοεῖν”, and “εἰκάζειν”.4 In spite of this, it might be useful to lay out the vocabulary that Herodotus uses specifically for the signification of inanimate objects – what things mean, say, or show to an interpreter.5"

The first two paragraphs of the "Appendix I: Expressions of Inanimate Signification in Herodotus" of the monograph of Andreas T. Zanker "Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning. The Classical Origins of a Modern Metaphor", C.H. Beck, Munich, 2016.

The whole Appendix can be found on the link that I gave above.