Language and Environment Pt. 2 (Ancient Greece)

Over the course of human history, individual cultures have referred to the nature around them by giving them names or by describing them with terms. Martin Heidegger argues that language beckons us towards a thing’s nature. Over the course of human history, language has developed a complex relationship to the nature of things as well as the environment. One of these stories was the introduction of the word planet in ancient Greece. When the term of planet was introduced, it meant “wanderer”. This was because the ancient Greeks understood planets as wanderers roaming the night sky. With this definition, we would not consider earth as a “planet”. However, since then language has changed and with that, the meanings of certain things. What once was defined as a wanderer, now means a huge floating rock in space. Though these defitinitions are similar, it would also mean that todays definition of Earth being a planet would not fit the ancient Greek definition. In this situation, the use of language to describe a celestial body has changed due to the change of human environment over the past 2,000 years. 



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