 The formation and correct use of language was a primary concern for Erasmus (as in Boyle 1977). He wrote several works that would seem to provide a starting point for a philosophy of language. Indeed, he devoted a treatise to the subject of language (De Lingua, The Tongue, 1525), but no systematic thought on the nature, origin, or function of language emerges from this tractate. We find only isolated comments about the relationship between words and things, for example, the statement that things were intelligible only through words, “by the sounds we attach to them”. A person who did not understand the force of words was “short-sighted, deluded, and unbalanced in his judgment of things as well” (CWE 24: 666). The treatise De Recta Pronuntiatione (The Right Way of Speaking, 1528) contains another stand-alone pronouncement. Citing the ancient physician Galen, Erasmus declares that language (oratio), rather than reason (ratio), was the distinguishing mark of human beings (CWE 26: 369). A promising statement in De Ratione Studii likewise remains without follow-up. “In principle, knowledge as a whole seems to be of two kinds, of things and of words”, Erasmus states. “Knowledge of words comes earlier, but that of things is the more important” (CWE 24: 666). These words appear to introduce a theory resembling the duality of word/thing developed in Plato’s Cratylus or Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but turn out to be only an organizational principle indicating to readers that Erasmus will talk first of language, then of content.