2021: Creating a Lexicon of Future

N is for Name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” ~ William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

“Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.” ~ Geographical Names and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In Genesis, the act of naming is what separates Man from animals; Adam proves his humanity through his capacity to give names. To the thinkers of modernity, from the sixteenth century up to and including the period of the Enlightenment, naming became a sure sign of humanity through the way it made claims for intellect, voice, and culture. Some of these philosophers would concede that all human knowledge is innate, and expressed by language; how we name would thus be secondary to the ideas that are already in us. This standpoint was represented by Descartes and his rationalist followers, for instance. Another standpoint would claim that language is the origin of knowledge, rather than the other way around. This idea was put forward by Condillac in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), which posited human language as a…