Greek Case in the Hellenistic and Byzantine Grammarians
GREEK CASE IN THE HELLENISTIC AND BYZANTINE GRAMMARIANS Andrew W. Pitts Observations on Greek grammar are found in the pre-Socratic philosophers, fth-century bc rhetoricians, as well as philosophers within and after the Socratic period, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. During this period of linguistic scholarship, however, grammar was still viewed under the topi- cal heading of φιλοσοφία (philosophy).1 It was not until the Hellenistic period that linguistic studies—and Greek grammar in particular—began to have separate recognition.2 The development of this history indicates that there was little continuity among the Hellenistic grammarians and their treat- ments of case were either philosophical rather than linguistic (the Stoics), extremely elementary (Dionysius Thrax) or lacked an adequate context for the discussion of case (Apollonius Dyscolus). The most signi cant advances came from the Byzantine grammarians. While their work as a whole was not entirely innovative (including Maximus Planudes), few have recognized the importance of the Byzantine commentators on the Hellenistic grammarian Theodosius. Though they clearly had their problems, their remarks on his Κανόνες were more linguistically advanced than their predecessors and, in 1 On this period, see I. Sluiter, “The Greek Tradition,” in Wout Jac. van Bekkum et al., eds., The Emergence of Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 82; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 147–224. 2 Cf. R.H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 16; though this is not meant to suggest that there was much theoretical coherence or a generally accepted metalanguage, cf.
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