The notion of naming, or the association between a word and its meaning, has captured the interest of philosophers and linguists from time immemorial. The Greeks explored the phenomenon, most evidently in Plato's Cratylus, and postulated two views: conventionalism and naturalism. Similarly, Medieval Arab grammarians were fascinated by the phenomenon and in fact posited three views: conventionalism, naturalism, and inspirationalism. However, a careful examination of the views of Medieval Arab grammarians shows that the most authoritative grammarians, such as Sibawayh, Ibn Jinni, and Al-Batalyusi, subscribed to the conventionalism view alone. Moreover, unlike the Greek approach, which had a philosophical orientation, the approach of the Medieval Arab grammarians took a linguistic orientation due to their emphasis on the material and conceptual aspects of the "name" or word utterance and the "named" or referent. This paper focuses on the views of the Andalusian linguist, Al-Batalyusi (1052-1127 C.E.), whose treatises on language, and in particular that pertaining to "the name" and "the named," reveal an insightful analysis of the topic only paralleled in modern linguistics. The paper consists of two parts. The first part examines Al-Batalyusi's four established categories of associations between "the name" and "the named": 1) the conventional association between "the name and "the named," 2) the figurative association between "the name" and "the named," 3) the derivational association between "name and "the named," and 4) the discursive association between the "name" and "the named," depending on the intended reference and meaning of the two. The second part explores the striking resemblance of Al-Batalyusi's views with those of modern linguists and semioticians. The paper shows, for example, how Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) treated the topic through what he termed the "signifier" and the "signified" in a fundamentally similar (though not identical) way to that of Al-Batalyusi and how both terms came to be framed more recently as "utterance" and "referent" (e.g., John Lyons 1977) in much the same way it was framed by Al-Batalyusi almost a millennium ago. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to place the original contribution of Al-Batalyus--as well as to revise commonly held assumptions about Andalusian linguists in the Medieval period--not only within the Arabic grammatical tradition but also within the history of linguistics.