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7
Interpreting Animals
How, how much, why, and in which way did a dog bark in the Middle Ages? The question is not so whimsical as it seems.
In the course of their discussions on language, many medieval grammarians and logicians were usually quoting, as an example of pseudo language, the latratus canis. Not only the bark of the dog, indeed, but also the sounds of the horse, of the pigeon, of the cow and, it goes without saying, the language of parrots and magpies.
Animals in the Middle Ages "said" many things, but mostly without knowing it. In the Bestiaries they show up as living signs of something else. Characters of a book scriptus digito dei, they did not produce a language but were themselves "words" of a symbolic lexicon.
Philosophers and grammarians were interested in the latratus as a linguistic phenomenon, however, and they mention it in relation to the gemitus infirmorum and to other kinds of interjections. What aroused our curiosity was the fact thatif one extrapolates from each of these discourses a sort of taxonomic treeone realizes that in certain trees the latratus goes along with the gemitus infirmorum, whereas in some others it occupies a different node.
We thus realized that perhaps such a marginal question would have
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This chapter simply summarizes and elaborates upon some aspects of a broader study I made in 1983 in collaboration with three other authors: U. Eco, R. Lambertini, C. Marino, A. Tabarroni, "On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs," VS 38/39 (May/December 1984): 338 (now in U. Eco and C. Marmo, eds., On the Medieval Theory of Signs [Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989]). First published as "Latratus canis" in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 47 (1985), no. 1.

 
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