sêma · σῆμα · noun · Greek · sign, and grave
Sign
a mark that stands where something is not
The ancestor of semantics, semaphore and semiotics, and in Homer it means two things at once: a sign, and a tomb. The senses are not a coincidence to be explained away — a grave-mound is a mark heaped up exactly where a person has stopped being. Greek had one word for the thing that means and the marker over the dead, and appears never to have felt the need to separate them. That is a complete theory of signification carried in four letters: a sign is what stands in the place of an absence, and it is needed precisely because the thing itself is gone. Every department of this institute is downstream of that word, which is why it is the first entry in the Lexicon rather than a late one.
Sources · 4
- documented Homer, Iliad — σῆμα used both for a heaped grave-marker and for a sign or token.
- documented Liddell–Scott–Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. σῆμα.
- documented The English derivations: semantics, semaphore, semiotics, sematic.
- traditional The reading of the two senses as one idea — sign as substitute for absence. Widely argued in twentieth-century theory; it is an interpretation of the word, not a fact about it.