This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Centuries before Wittgenstein worried about private diaries, Al-Farabi was worrying about a different but related problem: what happens to Greek logic when it is translated into Arabic, a language with its own grammar, its own particles, its own way of marking existence and predication. His Book of Letters is, among other things, an extended meditation on the relationship between logic, grammar and the words a particular language happens to supply for saying that something is. Al-Farabi noticed that Arabic, unlike Greek, has no simple copula verb doing the philosophical work to be does in Aristotle's logic, and he treated this not as a curiosity of translation but as a genuine philosophical problem: is the distinction between essence and existence a fact about the world, or partly an artifact of how a given language happens to be built. His answer leaned toward the world, arguing that logic aims at relationships holding independently of any one language's grammar, with Arabic's particles standing in, sometimes awkwardly, for distinctions Greek marked more directly. But the very act of asking the question, of treating a language's grammar as a possible source of philosophical confusion rather than a transparent window onto reality, anticipates a worry that would not be stated so starkly again until the twentieth century. Where Wittgenstein diagnosed philosophical problems as scars left by language, Al-Farabi got there first from a completely different direction, trying to carry one language's logic honestly into another's grammar.