ABSTRACT
De Morgan 1 said that, “if all mankind had spoken one language, we cannot doubt that there would have been a powerful, perhaps universal, school of philosophers who would have believed in the inherent connexion between names and things; who would have taken the sound man to be the mode of agitating the air which is essentially communicative of the ideas of reason, cookery, bipedality, etc. … ‘The French,’ said the sailor, ‘call a cabbage a shoe; the fools! Why can’t they call it a cabbage, when they must know it is one?’”
