Abstract:
The Philosophy of Descartes marked the starting point of modern philosophy. One of the main characteristics of this French rationalistic philosophy, which was followed by English empiricism and German Idealism, is a special attention to the "subject" instead of the cosmos, being or God. But the question is what caused such a turn to "subject"? With a historical linguistic approach it can be shown that the replacement of old languages of philosophy, namely Greek, Arabic and Latin by modern European languages, namely French, English and German can be one of the causes of this turn to "subject". In this research, we will concentrate on the word order and the possibility of the omission of the subject in the sentences of languages pertaining to different philosophical traditions from different historical contexts. In modern European languages of philosophy (French, English, German) there is an insistence on the subject to appear at the beginning of the sentence. These three languages are among the very limited number of Non Null Subject languages which do not permit the subject to be omitted from the beginning of the sentence. These languages were null subject in the course of their history, but at the same time with the appearance of modern philosophy (first half of the 17th century) they became non null subject languages.
Machine summary:
With a historical linguistic approach it can be shown that the replacement of old languages of philosophy, namely Greek, Arabic and Latin by modern European languages, namely French, English and German can be one of the causes of this turn to "subject".
In modern European languages of philosophy (French, English, German) there is an insistence on the subject to appear at the beginning of the sentence.
In this way, some philosophical languages like Greek, Arabic, Latin, French, English and German will be compared.
So, based on the findings of Greenberg on the word order and also based on the Null Subject possibility, we will study the place of subject and the state and importance given to it in sentences of different philosophical languages.
So Greek as an ancient philosophical language will be compared with languages of medieval philosophy namely Arabic, Persian and Latin and all of them with the languages of modern philosophy, namely French, English and German.
(Bopp, 1989: 23) It may seem interesting that even in Descartes’ famous expression in Latin: “Cogito ergo sum” which is considered as the turning point to the modern philosophy, we see two verbs at the beginning of two sentences and in none of them the subject is clearly mentioned.
Similar to French and English, the German language became Non-Null Subject Language and this happened at the beginning of the 17th century - the same time of the emergence of the modern philosophy.
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