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Robert Henry ROBINS, the Byzantine Grammarians. Their Place in History (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 70), Berlin - New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1993

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Robert Henry ROBINS, the Byzantine Grammarians. Their Place in History (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 70), Berlin - New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1993 COMPTES RENDUS 341 Robert Henry ROBINS, The Byzantine Grammarians. Their Place in History (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 70), Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. XI + 278 pp. Cloth DM 168. Until very recently Byzantine grammarians did not enjoy a good press: they were almost unanimously considered mere compilators of the ancient grammatical tradition, showing little or no originality. As an example one could quote GUDEMAN’s statement (1916: 1749) on John GLYKYS: “Ori- ginalität auf dem Gebiete der Syntax wird man bei einem Byzantiner des 13. Jhdts. nicht erwarten”. This negative judgement of the Byzantine grammarians was echoed in recent times by BLANK (1987: 67). This poor esteem no doubt explains why so much foundational research remains to be done in this field. No catalogue of Byzantine grammatical manuscripts is available so far, and only a few texts have been critically edited, mainly through the laudable efforts of Daniel DONNET (1967; 1982), e.g. for the treatises of GREGORY OF CORINTH and MICHAEL SYNCELLUS. For MAXIMUS PLANUDES’s (13th c.) Perì syntáxeos “On syntax” and JOHN GLYKYS’s (14th c.) Perì orthótetos syntáxeos “On correct syntax”, on the other hand, we still have to rely on early 19th-century editions, and for the Erot1mata Grammatiká of MANUEL CHRYSOLORAS (14th c.) even on the editio princeps printed by Aldus MANUTIUS in 1522. In addition, no synthetic study of the Byzantine grammarians was available, and here ROBINS’s book fills a real gap in the historiographi- cal literature. ROBINS has set himself three goals: (1) to situate the Byzantine gram- marians in their historical-cultural context, (2) to show their importance as bridge-builders between grammatical scholarship in Antiquity and in the Renaissance, and (3) to highlight the originality of those grammari- ans who made an important contribution to syntactic theory. The general structure of the monograph follows from these objectives. The first three chapters are devoted to the context in which the gram- marians worked, chapters 4 to 11 discuss the ancient views on which they based themselves (esp. the works of DIONYSIUS THRAX and APOL- LONIUS DYSCOLUS), and present the most important grammarians and their theories, while the final chapter clarifies their contribution to the study of Greek grammar in the Renaissance1. 1 The titles of the twelve chapters are: “Outline of Byzantine history: the political context”, “The Byzantine œuvre: the literary context”, “Byzantine grammar: the lin- guistic context”, “The Téchne grammatike: the foundations”, “Priscian: the Latin gram- marian of Constantinople”, “The Kanónes and their commentators: the morphological data-base”, “Epimerismoí and schedographía: teaching methods”, “Michael Syncellus: a typical Byzantine syntax book”, “Gregory of Corinth: the avoidance of errors”, “John 342 REVIEWS ROBINS (p. 11) rightly stresses that “no body of specialist literature can be written or appreciated without reference to the general context of political, social, and intellectual conditions and circumstances in which the individual works were composed”. His first chapter therefore dis- cusses the political context, from ca. 330 (when Byzantium was rebap- tized as the New Rome) till 1453 A.D. (the fall of Constantinople). The second chapter, which is devoted to the “literary” context, explains how the grammatical production fits entirely into the general tendency of preservation of Classical Greek language and literature. The Byzantine period was mainly a “retrospective” civilization. The “linguistic” con- text (chapter 3), characterized by the growing distance between the Greek “Umgangssprache” and Classical Greek and, on the other hand, by the need to impose Greek on the nations of the former Persian Empire, explains the basically didactic orientation of the grammatical treatises with their primordial concern for linguistic correction and pre- vention of errors. The Byzantine grammarians were first of all teachers, as had been, for a similar reason, their ancient predecessors. This fact also explains the general primacy of phonology and morphology with respect to syntax, with syntactic analysis always being based on a set of morphological classes and categories. The Byzantine grammarians’ canonical text was the Tékhne gram- matik1 of the Alexandrian scholar DIONYSIUS THRAX (2nd-1st c. B.C.). ROBINS translates almost the complete manual (see chapter 4) and pro- vides explanatory notes, mainly based on the numerous Byzantine scho- liasts who have commented upon the Tékhne (cf. also LALLOT’s com- mentary of 1989). We regret somehow that ROBINS still works from the Greek text printed by I. BEKKER (Anecdota Graeca, vol. II) in 1816, which shows important divergences from the much more critical, and now standard, edition by Gustav UHLIG (1883; anastatic reprint 1965). On the other hand, we should praise him for his judicious approach of the well-known “authenticity problem” connected with the Tékhne. We basically agree with him (cf. SELDESLACHTS – SWIGGERS – WOUTERS, forthcoming) that the manual, as we have it now, should be considered “the first and canonical ‘edition’ of an original textbook written by Dionysius which has passed through various alterations in the light of theoretical and technical revisions, while retaining the name of the orig- inal author as a mark of its prestigious origin” (p. 44). The Latin grammarian PRISCIAN (ca. 500) fully deserves the chapter devoted to him, and this not only for chronological reasons (chapter 6). Building on the syntactic works of APOLLONIUS DYSCOLUS (2nd c. A.D.) Glykys: the maintenance of standards”, “Maximus Planudes: a Byzantine theoretician”, “The Byzantine contribution to the study of Greek grammar in the Renaissance”. COMPTES RENDUS 343 PRISCIAN provided the materials for the study of Latin grammar in the Middle Ages and paved the way for the theoretical progress made by medieval grammarians. Whereas his Greek colleagues wanted to restore the standard of Classical Greek, PRISCIAN tried, in his Institutiones Grammaticae and in his exercise book Partitiones, to promote correct Latin. Nevertheless, he expects his reader to be familiar not only with Latin, but also with Greek literature and with the basics of Greek gram- mar. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with specific types of Byzantine grammatical handbooks. The Kanónes of THEODOSIUS (second half of the 4th c. A.D.) enjoyed an enormous success, comparable to that of DIONYSIUS’s Tékhne. The Kanónes were later provided with extensive comments by CHOEROBOSCUS (ca. 750–825), SOPHRONIUS and CHARAX (9th cent.). As a morphological database listing all the theoretically possible forms of nouns and verbs, even those unattested in actual use, they were a practi- cal help for students in analysing verbal and nominal forms with differ- ent lexical roots. Also of a specifically didactic nature were the Epimerismoí, containing a parsing of phrases and sentences and the assigning of their components to specific grammatical classes, and the skhéde (“lessons”), a kind of small-scale epimerismoí. The excerpt of CHOEROBOSCUS’s epimerismós on Psalm 1, verse 1, which ROBINS pre- sents as an example and of which he provides an integral translation (pp. 130-135), contains three pages (!) of comment with reference to a single word. Chapters 8 to 11 present the four most important Byzantine gram- marians and highlight their originality in the field of syntax. Although the study of Greek syntax started much earlier, viz. in the second cen- tury A.D. with the abovementioned APOLLONIUS DYSCOLUS, it was left to the Byzantine grammarians to write separate expositions on it for the use of teachers and students. They made syntax into a distinct component of grammar, next to phonetics and morphology. All their treatises share the same overall features: they are didactic in scope, and they are word-based in their approach. But the focus of attention could be different. Michael SYNCELLUS’s Méthodos perì tòs toû lógou syntáxeos “Treatise on the syntax of the sentence” (first half of the 9th c.), discussed in chapter 8, and GREGORY OF CORINTH’s Perì syntáxeos toû lógou 1toi perì toû m6 soloikízein “On the syntax of the sentence, or rather on the avoidance of syntactic errors” (12th-13th c.), dis- cussed in chapter 9, are equally interested in the syntactic characteris- tics of the different parts of speech. John GLYKYS’ interest, on the other hand, in his Perì orthótetos syntáxeos “On correct syntax”, the subject of ROBINS’s chapter 10, lies with the relations of cases to verbs, and more specifically with the issue of verbs which can take 344 REVIEWS two cases in different constructions. Maximus PLANUDES (1260 – c. 1310) was beyond any doubt the most competent Byzantine grammar- ian (chapter 11). In his Perì grammatikòs diálogos “A dialogue on grammar” and in his treatise Perì syntáxeos “On syntax” he develops original and valuable theories on cases and tenses. ROBINS devotes extensive attention (pp. 215-233) to PLANUDES’s approach of these morphosyntactic issues. In his final chapter ROBINS examines the contribution made by the Byzantine grammarians to the study of Greek in the early Renaissance period (up to ca. 1500 A.D.). After 1261 several scholars from the East- ern Empire were invited to Italy as teachers of Greek. While their pre- decessors had to defend Greek against barbarism, this new generation had to reintroduce Greek, which had become a foreign language, in the West. Their pupils, speaking Italian as their mother-tongue and having learned Latin at school, were now learning Greek as a classical lan- guage. Among the most important grammarians in this period one should mention Manuel CHRYSOLORAS (1350–1415), whose Erot1mata offer little or no theoretical discussion (thus mainly continuing the tradi- tion of the Tékhne), but put strong emphasis on the full paradigms of the inflected forms, Constantine LASCARIS (15th c.), author of an Epitom6 tön okt8 toû lógou méron “A summary of the eight parts of speech”, and Theodore of GAZA (15th c.), whose Grammatikòs eisagog1 “Introduc- tion to grammar” was by far the most comprehensive of the early Renaissance Greek grammars.
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