Does Asymmetric Signification Rely on Conventional Rules? Two Answers from Ancient Indian and Greek Sources

The topic of dissymmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological levels of language emerges very early in Indian technical and speculative reflections as it also does in pre-Socratic Greek thought. Such a linguistic phenomenon is generally considered as a problematic exception of the one-to-one principle of correspondence between words and the objects they denoted. This well established relation seems to have been presupposed for each analysis of the signification long before its earliest statement - which to the best of my knowledge dates back to a couple of Kātyāyana’s vārttikas (3rd c. BCE), i.e. aphorisms commenting on a quarter of the grammatical rules enunciated by Pāṇini (5th c. BCE). The present paper aims at shedding light on two different patterns of tackling the mentioned problem, which were already testified in some Brāhmaṇa- and Upaniṣad-passages attributed to the 9th-6th c. BCE, and later developed in more thoroughly philosophical or linguistic works (5th-2nd c. BCE). In short, the first approach sees dissymmetry as an exception to the regular correspondence between language and reality, whereas the second approach considers language in itself, as a conceptualisation which does not faithfully represent reality. In the latter case, dissymmetry is no longer an exception, but the rule.