In that case, the tree-like structure would have given way to a system of interconnected nodes, which, as Chapter 1 suggested, Thomas may have caught a glimpse of but could not admit. Independently, however, of these considerations, what is clear is that the contradictions of Thomas’s solution stem from the fact that he is playing a double (and irreconcilable) game. One is grammatical, and it required that the voces (lettered or not) be distinguished according to their articulatory possibilities—and this is what Priscian, as a good grammarian, did. The other was semantic, and it required that the difference be posited between meaningful and nonmeaningful voces. The two taxonomies could not coexist. Thomas appears convincing when he speaks of one issue rather than the other, but he reveals all his uncertainty when he attempts (albeit motivated simply by a desire for taxonomical clarity) to put the two discourses together into a single system.
At this point, we could leave Thomas to his fate, gratified by the fact that once again our pursuit of the barking dog has succeeded in revealing the weaknesses or contradictions of a system. At most, we could point out that Thomas does not use articulata in the same sense as Priscian (that is, “endowed with meaning”), but in the same sense as Ammonius, and that consequently blitris is an example of a vox non significativa that nonetheless has a phonetic articulation and at the same time can be transcribed alphabetically. But it is precisely this observation that leads us to wonder why Priscian (and the grammarians who follow him) attributed to articulata a connection with meaning. Nota bene, it is not that they try to meld a taxonomy of articulations with one of signification, but that they take practically for granted that there is a connection, which they do not however explore, between articulation and meaning. In the first instance we could argue that they assumed that one articulates only to express something—and this was the hypothesis that was made in Latratus canis 1989.
In fact, when we go back to Ammonius’s commentary, we see that he makes explicit and implicit reference to Plato’s Cratylus, suggesting that there is a close link between articulatio and significatio. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates expounds the notion according to which whoever invented the first names created them in imitation of things, endeavoring to reproduce, through the coordination of letters and syllables, their nature. In other words, there would be a relationship of an iconic type between the phonological structure of the signans and the ontological structure of the signatum. A theory very close to this is found among the Stoics.39 So it becomes comprehensible why Priscian, heir to a grammatical tradition with its roots in Stoicism, goes so far as to identify the articulatio of the vox with its significatio, followed in this by all medieval grammarians,40 while, in the logical-philosophical tradition (untouched by the grammatical tradition), the articulatio has nothing to do with the meaning, but concerns the litteratio, and hence the possibility of the written translation of the sound.41
However that may be, it is obvious that among the grammarians the barking of the dog was on track for an unhappy ending. All the grammarian is interested in are the sounds articulated by humans, observant, precisely, of a grammar, in order to express meanings. The sounds made by animals are of no interest. Accordingly, in the texts of the grammarians the barking of the dog is destined to occupy an increasingly marginal position. For, if the first hypothesis (the influence of the Cratylus) were to be valid, then, given that the meaningfulness of the name is the consequence of an original relationship of iconicity, hence the articulatio, the voces of the animals, by common consent neither articulate or articulable, would not represent a subject of great interest. Animals are not aware that nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and they are not capable of imitating the nature of things.42
4.2.7. Back to Thomas
Clearly, at this point, we may skip the tradition of the grammarians. What interests us instead is the tradition of the philosophers, who continue to grant the dog and his bark a position of honor in the classification of signs. This is also because the philosophers, in addition to the classifications they elaborate, following the lead of the De interpretatione, are constantly induced to make supplementary observations. Take Thomas, who, in Sententia libri Politicorum (I, I/b), comes back once more to the difference between human and animal voces. Since, he affirms, nature never does anything gratuitously but always has a definite purpose, it is obvious that, although various animals possess a “voice,” only humans possess a locutio and, though there may be animals capable of repeating human words, we cannot say that they talk, because they do not understand what they are saying, but utter the words they have learned out of mere habit. Animal “voices” serve to express sadness or delight and other passions (and once again the barking of the dog is cited and the roar of the lion: “et haec sibi invicem significant per aliquas naturales voces, sicut leo per rugitum et canis per latratum”), while humans, instead of these voces, use interjections. But only human locutio is able to signify things useful and harmful, just and unjust, good and evil.43
Here Thomas takes a step forward. He recognizes that, just as humans have ways of signifying to each other, alternately and intentionally, sadness and delight, the same is true of animals, and he thus touches on a problem that will be treated at greater length by Roger Bacon, who will distinguish between the moan that the sick man utters inadvertently and the interjection that he utters intentionally, following a certain linguistic convention, to signify the same pain, in however conceptually imperfect a manner.44
But, in this way, within the same Thomist system, the latratus canis changes position, as if, halfway between the voces significativae naturaliter (among which we find the gemitus) and the voces ad placitum (where we find spoken language), we were to locate an intermediate zone, in which humans produce (paralinguistically, we would say today) interjections, while dogs bark. In fact, in this revised classification, the real difference between human and canine language lies not in the opposition intentional/unintentional (vaguely touched upon, but basically eluded), and not only in that between natural and ad placitum, but in the opposition between the interjection and the ability of human language to express abstractions by means of which humans set up domum et civitatem (“ergo homo est naturale animal domesticum et civile”)—an affirmation that Thomas takes up from Aristotle’s Politics 1253 at 9–30, where Aristotle opposes human language, capable of producing concepts and abstractions, to the inarticulate sounds of animals, expressive merely of pleasure or pain.
4.2.8. Roger Bacon
Not unmindful of Augustine’s provocation, enter at this point Roger Bacon. The classification of signs outlined in Bacon’s De signis strikes us in many ways as syncretistic and as yet unresolved. The eccentricities of this classification find their explanation in a project whose results will be seen in later semiotics, especially in Ockham. Briefly, up until Bacon, thanks to the Aristotelian vulgate, words signify the passions of the soul (concepts, universal species), species bear an iconic relationship to things, and words, through the mediation of species, serve to name things (nominantur singularia, sed universalia significantur, “they name individual things while they signify universals”). With the De signis, on the other hand, words begin to signify directly individual things, of which the species intelligibiles are the mental counterpart. But the link between words and species becomes secondary and is reduced to a purely symptomatic relationship. Bacon has grasped the difference between symbola and semeia in De interpretatione 16a but, on the basis of a philologically correct reading, he elaborates a philosophically unfaithful reading. In other words, he erases the fact that for Aristotle words may be symptoms of the passions of the mind, but in the first instance they signify them directly, and he concludes that words are symptoms of the species that are formed in the mind.45 We have endeavored to reconstruct Bacon’s classification in Figure 4.8.