Blituri  

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Blituri (or blitiri) is a term used by the Ancients and Scholastics to indicate a nonsense word.

Other words in this category are skindapsos, tophlattothrattophlattothrat (only used once in The Frogs) and babazuf (less common).

Contemporary sources

Umberto Eco

"“blitiri,” like “babazuf,” is a term used by the late Scholastics to indicate a word devoid of meaning." --Umberto Eco in On Literature

Gilles Deleuze

"from Sextus Empiricus we learn that the Stoics had at their disposal a word stripped of meaning, "Blituri," and that they employed it in a doublet with the correlate "Skindapsos."" --Logique du sens, Gilles Deleuze

"There is only one kind of word which expresses both itself and its sense — precisely the nonsense word: abraxas, snark or blituri" --Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze

John T. Kirby

(The term "blitiri" — most accurately, blituri — is used by the ancient Greeks as onomatopoeic for the sound of a harp string; too, it is used, by such late-antique writers as Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius, as Aristophanes [in The Frogs] had used tophlattothrattophlattothrat: to signify meaningless sound (John T. Kirby 2000).

Various

“not every word is a name or verb, for meaningless words like ‘blituri’ and ‘skindapsos’ are neither of these.” Ammonius, “On Aristotle On Interpretation 1-8,” ed. David Blank (London: Duckworth, 1996), 26. On blityri and skindapsos generally, cf. especially Wolfram Ax, Laut, Stimme und Sprache: Studien zu Drei Grundbegriffen der Antiken Sprachtheorie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 195–99; Stephan Meier-Oeser and W Schröder, “Skindapsos,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 1996. --Theories of the Nonsense Word in Medieval England, Kirk, Jordan

Ancient and scholastic sources

Diogenes Laërtius

a spoken word need not always signify something. For example blituri (βλίτυρι) is unintelligible, yet still it is a spoken word. --Diogenes Laërtius via [1]

Ammonius Hermiae

while they can be written down, like human speech; some sounds are meaningful, though they cannot be written down, like the barking of a dog; other sounds are meaningless, but they can be written down, like the word blituri; still other ... --Commentary on Aristotle's De Interpretatione (Ammonius Hermiae), (tr. Versteegh 1977)

See also

• Babazuf
• Nonsense word