# Ancient Greek Views on Greek and Other Languages

Toon van Hal

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Toon van Hal. Ancient Greek Views on Greek and Other Languages. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2023, 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.922. hal-05190795

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# Ancient Greek Views on Greek and Other Languages

Postprint publication of

Van Hal, Toon. 2023. "Ancient Greek Views on Greek and Other Languages." *Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics*, Oxford University Press. Available at: https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-922.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.922

## Summary

The Ancient Greeks came into contact with possibilities and problems related to ‘language’ in several respects. The earliest epics contained implicit etymological explanations, and both the pre-Socratic philosophers and the sophists were intrigued by the link between the form of words and the meaning they carried. The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet was an additional stimulus to start reflecting on language. ‘Letters’ became the smallest unit of inquiry in Greek language thought. Of the other units, the word was seen as the most significant level.

Elaborating on the philosophical foundations laid by Plato, Aristotle, and early Stoic thinkers, Alexandrian scholars started shaping a philologically oriented tradition of grammar, which was largely oriented to the study of the eight parts of speech and directed at young students of Greek literature. Within the frame of grammar, less attention was paid to the level of the sentence, which explains why syntactic issues were not intensively explored. At its inception, Greek lexicography was an ancillary tool for understanding Greek literary texts too, directed at an audience of native speakers of Greek. Hence, lexicographical projects limited to including difficult or special words. Only once Romans began to delve into the study of Greek did the composition of general lexicons become more urgent.

## 1. Introduction

It would take until the 19th century before language became the pivot around which a new autonomous discipline began to revolve.¹ Of course, this need not mean that ‘language’ could not have aroused interest in generations of scholars predating the 19th century (cf. Matthews, 2019, pp. 7, 12). Nevertheless, this interest was mostly tailored to one or more major branches or fields in which language played a significant role. In the introduction to a collected volume, Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood noted somewhat to their surprise that it took such a long time before language, including its origins, structures, and varieties, was examined in a systematic vein (Frede & Inwood, 2005, p. 1). But is it so natural that ‘language’ would become the topic of a stand-alone discipline? In contemporary linguistics, centrifugal forces seem to dominate; language is often studied in relation to other domains, such as evolution, education, communication, and related disciplines such as biology, psychology, cognitive science, semiotics
—and the differences between all these specializations are in many cases almost insurmountable. Hence, the question arises: To what aspects of language did the Greeks direct their attention, and in what broader context should their interest in language and languages be understood?

This article offers a general *tour d'horizon*, successively covering etymology, literacy, grammaticography, lexicography, and the Greeks' interest in other languages. Greek philosophy of language, which is discussed only in passing, deserves a more extensive treatment elsewhere (see Coseriu, 2015 for a first orientation; see also Swiggers & Wouters, 2002 for the interconnection between grammaticography and philosophy of language).

## 2. Etymology

It makes sense to start this overview with etymology, which in the Greek world precedes the first grammatical treatise by far (Herbermann, 1991). Homer's epics already contain etymological allusions (Grintser, 2011). What is at stake here, is, of course, 'applied etymology', not yet meta- linguistic reflection. And both pre-Socratics and sophists—each for their own purposes—were concerned with the relationship between 'words' and 'things' and with how words should be correctly interpreted. Yet the fragmentary nature of many source texts obscures our knowledge (Garcea, 2013). In one of Plato's dialogues, *Cratylus*, the correctness of names ('ἀρθότης ὀνομάτων') takes center stage. Plato is interested in whether research into words can bring us closer to truth, and etymological explorations are a necessary part of this. It is often assumed that even though Greeks scholars were obsessed with etymology, they failed to understand its most basic principles. However, it might be more correct to claim that the Greeks were still practicing etymology in its original etymological sense, and that what today is done under the rubric of etymology has meanwhile completely shifted from original practice. On its centuries-long journey, etymology has undergone so many metamorphoses "that our comprehension of ancient linguistic practice in these areas has fluctuated between indifference and prejudice" (Nifadopoulos, 2003, p. 11).

The lemma καρδία ('heart') in a modern etymological dictionary of ancient Greek sets out with a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form (*kɛ́r(d)), which precedes a host of related words in other languages, such as Sanskrit hṛd-aya, Latin cor, and Gothic hairto (Beekes, 2010, p. 644).

According to Greek scholars themselves, however, καρδία was related to both κράτησις ('rule') and κυρεία ('authority'), because the heart comprises the dominant and ruling part of the soul (Allen, 2005, p. 33). In contrast to contemporary etymology, original etymology is thus ahistorical and intralingual in nature: it does not search for the history of a word, instead explaining Greek words from Greek. Orion, a 5th-century lexicographer, considered that it was the task of etymology "to find from the naming itself of the thing its interpretation and the reason why it is" (Peraki-Kyriakidou, 2002, p. 481). A late scholion defined etymology as "the unfolding of words, through which their true meaning can be made clear" (cf. Garcea, 2013).

Ancient etymology thus seeks to investigate why a particular word reads as it does—a form of 'ontological semantics', as one scholar once effectively characterized it (Fresina, 1990, p. 110). Rather than tracing and reconstructing older language stages, it thus consolidates and mutually associates meanings of words. The activity of etymologizing is older than its name: scholars seem to agree that the Stoic Chrysippus, to whom we also owe the etymology of heart, is at the root of the term etymology (the word ἔτυμος means 'true', 'genuine', 'reliable'). What this shows is how the term has taken on several guises over the centuries, so that today it covers a different scope than in antiquity (Matthews, 2019, p. 9; Swiggers, 1996, p. 352).

In the classical world, etymology was not a theoretically developed branch of learning in its own right, but it did serve as a fruitful 'heuristic tool' in the most diverse fields. Practitioners of oratory and natural science, lawyers, and poets: all of them
made enthusiastic use of etymology, each with their own agenda. The scope of these etymological exercises was extremely broad.

Ineke Sluiter has argued that in Greek society, the use of etymology was seen as a powerful strategy to deal with knowledge of the world. Words were transformed into repositories of cultural information, thus serving to support cultural memory (Sluiter, 2015). Nor can etymology be separated from the complex and persistent *nomos/physis* discussion: here the question arises as to whether words obtained their names on natural (*physis*) or conventional (*nomos/thesis*) grounds. For the sophists, this discussion would even transcend the mere epistemological level and yield direct sequelae in everyday life (Schmitter, 2000, p. 357). In *Cratylus*, Plato introduced representatives of both sides. Aristotle would become a powerful representative of the conventional strand. Siebenborn (1976, pp. 22–23) has shown that this dichotomy has led to a great deal of confusion among both ancient and modern commentators, given that the discussion raged in divergent contexts (including the question of language origin).

In Jean Lallot’s view, ancient etymology is characterized by both dynamism and stagnation: the lack of a methodological or empirical foundation led it to degenerate into a mere accumulation of word explanations. The fact that multiple etymologies were offered for one and the same word was generally seen as reinforcing, rather than conflicting, evidence (Lallot, 1991). It is fair to say that quite a few classical authorities also expressed their aversion to ‘etymological quacks’ (Allen, 2005, p. 14). There is no consensus among scholars as to whether Plato in *Cratylus* took etymology seriously or just made fun of it (Sedley, 2003). Because of the independent status of etymology vis-à-vis grammar, some scholars speak of an ‘extralinguistic genesis’ of etymology (Fresina, 1990, p. 109), even though such an assessment is very much rooted in the central role and even primacy attributed to grammar in linguistic thought. Even after the development and flourishing of Greek grammaticography, historical interfaces with etymology remained limited, but not absent (cf. Herbermann, 1991, p. 366; Sluiter, 2015, pp. 919–920).

### 3. Language, Script, and Literacy

Although the Greeks were interested in the origins of individual words, a creation myth of language as such is, in opposition to other ancient traditions, strikingly absent (Colombat et al., 2010, p. 67; Gambarara, 1989, pp. 79–81). In comparison, the invention of writing was more frequently addressed (see e.g., Steiner, 1994). The alphabet seemed to be quite present in Greek society—not only as an instrument, but also as an object of reflection. The comedian Callias once dedicated a comedy to the alphabet, and Plutarch wondered why the *a* held the first place in the alphabet (Novokhatko, 2020a, pp. 18–19; Roskam, 2020). Ultimately, the *technè* *grammatikè* referred to the art of dealing with letters (γράμματα), and in Plato’s time, teachers of this *technè* taught letters, not grammar (as such, grammar did not yet exist). It seems obvious that the numerous ‘abecedaria’ played a didactic role in Greek schools, even though there is now evidence that a number of them predate the first schools (West, 2015, p. 55). This semantic evolution already suggests that the attention given to the written word paved the way to reflection on language. From about 100 BCE onward, the *grammatikos* started focusing on teaching grammar (the ‘secondary level’ of education), and it was the *grammatodidaskalos* who taught younger children (aged between 7 and 11) how to learn and write (Van Elst, 2009, p. 120). Papyrus remains suggest that teaching in Egypt began with learning to write one’s own name and the alphabet, respectively, before actual reading instruction began (Stolk, 2019).

Given that literacy is thus a significant precondition for metalinguistic issues (even if it is not a *conditio sine qua non*), it is important to address the degree of literacy in the Greek world. It is safe to say that until the 5th century, political and cultural life was predominantly rooted in orality. A chain of interlocking events led to Greek society becoming more attached to writing in the course of the 4th century, when the importance of written texts began to outweigh that of spoken speeches.
According to Anna Novokhatko, the Athenian statesman Lycurgus played a key symbolic role in this regard. In 330 BCE he decreed that official texts of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, should be recorded (Novokhatko, 2020a, p. 22). There is no doubt that Athens was a major center of literacy, and that the Greek world in general towered over other contemporary civilizations in this regard. Already by the end of the 5th century, a substantial part of the Athenian population had a basic education in reading and writing. The infamous Athenian procedure of *ostracism*, which may have been initiated at the end of the 6th century, could run smoothly only if a sufficiently large crowd managed to scratch the name of the fellow citizen into a potsherd: 6,000 votes were required before a citizen was forced to leave the city. Ostracism had a counterpart in Syracuse (in Sicily, then known as *Magna Graecia*), which was organized under the heading of ‘petalism’: instead of potsherds, olive leaves were used. These examples therefore demonstrate a relatively broad base of literacy, which can be contrasted with the somewhat sobering fact that many adults in 18th-century Western European regions were unable to spell their own names.

## 3.1 Capita Selecta from Greek Grammar

‘Letters’ were considered to be the most basic hierarchical level of a grammar. In total, Greek scholars distinguished four layers in language: letters were part of syllables, syllables of words, and words of sentences or utterances—Apollonius Dyscolus made this taxonomy explicit in his writings. On the level of the sentence, according to Diogenes Laërtius, the sophist Protagoras, for instance, distinguished between ‘wishes’, ‘questions’, ‘answers’, and ‘commands’. But of these four levels, the word eventually received by far the most attention in classical grammars.

Syllables were of particular importance for accentuation and metrics, while an in-depth study of the sentence would take the grammarian too far into the realm of rhetoric. The classical grammarians therefore placed particular importance on the word as the smallest level of meaning. This implies that they did not focus their attention on meaningful word parts (e.g., morphemes, which are central to the Indian tradition) or word groups (phrases) (Matthews, 1994, pp. 44, 97–98, 101). However, it would be an unacceptable simplification to present the classical grammarians as a homogeneous group.

Plato and Aristotle already introduced a number of distinctions that would prove to be of great importance to later grammaticographers (cf. section 3.2), but their interest was philosophically motivated. Also among the Stoics, metalinguistic reflection was still an integral part of philosophical doctrine. In 230 BCE Chrysippus succeeded Cleanthes, who had previously taken over the torch from Zeno, founder of the Stoa. Of the more than 700 books he is said to have published, including Περὶ τῆς συντάξεως τῶν λεγομένων (‘Of the arrangement of words spoken’) and Περὶ τῆς συντάξεως καὶ στοιχείων τῶν λεγομένων πρὸς Φιλιππον (‘Of the elements of speech and on words spoken’) (Diogenes Laërtius, 7.192–193), only a few papyrus fragments and later doxographic testimonies now remain, which were mostly written down by ‘hostile and/or incompetent’ authors (Schmidhauser, 2010, p. 502). All of this is further complicated by the importance the Stoics attached to the smooth integration of all their doctrines into a larger, coherent system, which in turn has undergone several centuries of evolution (Baratin, 1991, p. 193). Language research in Chrysippus’s philosophical system was part of logic (Schmidhauser, 2010, p. 503). A fundamental distinction was made between the ‘signifiers’ and the ‘signified’, thus somewhat foreshadowing the well-known Saussurean pair. The library of Herculaneum hosts a number of papyrus rolls. These were preserved, albeit in a heavily damaged shape, under the ashes after the eruption of the Vesuvius. If scholars succeed in developing special equipment to disclose their contents, there is a chance that our source texts on Stoic language theory will be expanded.

Gradually, the ties with philosophy were loosened, and language study, “technè grammatikè,” turned into a stand-alone discipline that was first and foremost directed at philological text study and propaedeutic didactics, which explains why the field was almost doomed to remain of a nonspecialist nature (Sluiter, 1990, p. 39). The oldest grammar of the West was
rightly or wrongly attributed to Dionysius Thrax, a scholar from the Alexandrian school in the 2nd century BCE. In recent decades there has been an enormous amount of research into the origins, development, and functions of technical grammar in the Ancient Greek society. The work of Apollonius Dyscolos is generally considered the pinnacle of Greek thought on language, in part because in his endeavor language is almost a subject in its own right. Because it is impossible to offer a full account in the frame of this article, five illustrative case studies follow here.

## 3.2 Parts of Speech: A Success Story

The English expression 'parts of speech', which today is prominently used in AI applications, is a calque of the Latin *partes orationis*, which in turn goes back to the Greek *μέρη τοῦ λόγου*. The collocation was already used by Plato, but it then still referred to entities related to the sentence. Evolving organically over the centuries, “parts of speech” eventually became essential building stones of technical grammar, referring more exclusively to word classes. In the end, the word class model would become the very backbone of grammatical description in antiquity. In its canonical form it looked like Table 1.

<table><caption>Table 1. Overview of the Canonical Eight Parts of Speech, in Greek, Latin, and English</caption><tr><td>δνομα</td><td>nomen</td><td>noun</td></tr><tr><td>ρήμα</td><td>verbum</td><td>verb</td></tr><tr><td>μετοχή</td><td>participium</td><td>participle</td></tr><tr><td>ἀρθρον</td><td>(articulus)</td><td>article</td></tr><tr><td>ἀντωνυμία</td><td>pronomen</td><td>pronoun</td></tr><tr><td>πρόθεσις</td><td>praepositio</td><td>preposition</td></tr><tr><td>σύνδεσμος</td><td>conjunctio</td><td>conjunction</td></tr><tr><td>ἐπίρρημα</td><td>adverbium</td><td>adverb</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>interjectio</td><td>Interjection</td></tr></table>

Each of these eight word classes was further defined on the basis of a number of characteristics, which were described in Latin as *accidentia* (features or attributes such as ‘gender’, ‘case’, ‘tense’, etc.) The canonical character of this framework may be gleaned from the solution the Romans came up with when they attempted to apply the word class model to their own language: given that an article was absent from Latin, the Roman grammarian Remmius Palaemon (1st century CE) probably introduced the interjection—in the Greek tradition still a subordinate of the adverb
—as an extra word class, in order to keep the number of parts of speech constant at eight. But the article also posed considerable problems for the Greeks themselves, because Homer, who was often simply referred to as “the poet,” still used the article in its original demonstrative sense (Schironi, 2002). In the Greek grammaticographical tradition, the parts of speech were presented in the same order, while there were multiple orders in the Latin tradition (see Holtz, 1981, pp. 64–68).

That the eight parts of speech were the outcome of an organic process is illustrated by the (highly simplified) diagram in Table 2 (cf. Colombat et al., 2010, pp. 83–86; Swiggers & Wouters, 2015, p. 793). The Alexandrian philologist Aristarchus is generally credited with having introduced the eight parts of speech (see Matthaios, 1999, p. 621).

<table><caption>**Table 2. The Development of the Parts of Speech System Throughout History**</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Stage 1 (Plato)</td><td>ἔνομα, ῥήμα</td></tr><tr><td>Stage 2 (Aristotle)</td><td>ἔνομα, ῥήμα, σύνδεσμος</td></tr><tr><td>Stage 3 (Stoics, 1st generation)</td><td>ἔνομα, ῥήμα, σύνδεσμος, ἄρθρον</td></tr><tr><td>Stage 4 (Stoics, 2nd generation)</td><td>ἔνομα, προσηγορία, ῥήμα, σύνδεσμος, ἄρθρον</td></tr><tr><td>Stage 5 (Stoics, 3rd generation)</td><td>ἔνομα, προσηγορία, ῥήμα, μεσότης, σύνδεσμος, ἄρθρον</td></tr><tr><td>Stage 6 (Technè)</td><td>ἔνομα, ῥήμα, μετοχή, ἄρθρον, ἀντωνυμία, πρόθεσις, ἐπίρρημα, σύνδεσμος</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Source:* Based on Swiggers and Wouters (2015, p. 793)

The reality may have been much more complex, precisely because this reconstruction is based on retrospective overviews of doxographers (Swiggers & Wouters, 2011). The Stoics distinguished between proper names (*ἔνομα*) and appelatives (*προσηγορία*), because the individual entity occupies a central place in their theory of knowledge. The participle (*μετοχή*) owes its name to the fact that participles have parts in the verb and noun class at the same time. The gradual expansion of the number of word classes did not prevent the allaround scholar Plutarchus from emphasizing that noun and verb basically remained the most essential parts of speech, as Jacob Wackernagel already observed in one of his lectures (Wackernagel, 2009, pp. 558–559).

In recent decades, great progress has been made in studying the career of various word types and their ‘accidentia’ (a recent example is Lallot, 2018, who examined the circumstances of the metaphorical transfer of the concrete πρόσωπον ‘face, mask’ to the abstract ‘grammatical person’). According to Matthaios (2018a, p. 107), who examined the genesis of πρόθεσις as a prepositional phrase, “a comprehensive study of grammatical terminology remains an open desideratum.” Alfons Wouters and Pierre Swiggers (2013) identified a number of reasons underlying the success of this model. They singled out the hands-on approach, as well as the possibilities for expanding, limiting, and refining the model. This has allowed scholars to apply it to many other languages without too much difficulty.
### 3.3 Aspect: Out of Scope?

Ancient Greek is a language in which aspectuality is very clearly marked through the different stems of the verb: λειπ- is the imperfective aspect stem ('present stam'); λιπ- is the perfective aspect stem ('aorist stem'), and λελοιπ- is the resultative aspect stem ('perfect stem'). The question thus arises whether the Greeks themselves were capable of identifying this linguistic category. Devoting an important contribution to this theme, Kees Versteegh (2013) concluded that the Greeks seem to have failed to acknowledge the basics of differences in aspectuality.

Today, the indicative imperfectum (present stem), the indicative aorist (aorist stem), and the indicative plusquamperfectum (perfectum stem) have in common that they all refer to the past: this is signaled by the augment (viz. ἕλειπον, ἕλιπον, ἑλελοίπειν). The differences between the three forms are thus of an aspectual nature. Nevertheless, Ancient grammarians would have made a different analysis, in that they would have claimed that the three forms would refer to different kinds of the past (παρεληλυθός). The indicative perfectum was seen as a past tense close to the present, while the indicative plusquamperfectum was considered to be a more distant past. As the name itself suggests, the aorist (ἀόριστος, 'undetermined') could refer to an undetermined past in a multipurpose way. In the tradition of school grammar, the aorist was thus used as a 'joker' for the past tense, both for the near and the more remote past. Thanks to a scholian, we know that by adding a temporal adverb, such as ἄρτι ('just now') or πάλαι ('a long time ago'), the aorist could be turned into a bounded tense, which also gave way to a shift in name (ώρισμένος, 'determined'). But we cannot exclude that some Hellenistic scholars, such as Aristarchus, may have had a notion of aspectuality. Unfortunately, the fragments are too scarce to be conclusive (Versteegh, 2013, p. 31; see also Coseriu, 2015, p. 112; Schironi, 2018, pp. 195–197, with further references).

### 3.4 The Middle: A Mediocre Solution?

In the grammar of Dionysius Thrax, a distinction is made between vowels and consonants. A strict division between 'sound' and 'letter' was not made. The consonants themselves were further subdivided, although not nearly as systematically as in the Indian tradition, where the order of the alphabet itself was based on strictly phonetic principles. Yet the resonants *m*, *l*, *n*, and *r* were already grouped together: in the present-day term 'liquid' the original name ὕγρά still resonates. The consonants known as 'stops' today were in turn divided into voiceless (π, κ, τ), voiced (β, γ, δ), and (voiceless) aspirated (φ, χ, θ) letters. The terms used here make us, however, assume that the Greeks failed to perceive some basic articulatory distinctions. Most symptomatically, the voiced stops were styled μέσα ('middle' or 'medium'), for reasons that remain entirely unclear. The term still figured in certain 19th-century manuals and grammars (Robins, 1990, p. 38).

The same term also appears in the description of voice (or *diathesis*, to make use of another influential technical Greek term): the middle (λούομαι, 'I am washing myself') is an in-between category of the active (λούω, 'I am washing [e.g., my child]') and the passive form (λούομαι, 'I am being washed'). Today, we know that these formations are informed by different semantic roles: the subject of an active form is typically an agent, the subject of a passive form is almost always a patient, while the subject of the middle is often both agent and patient at the same time. Once again, it seems that the Greeks chose this term for lack of a better one. In a recent monograph, Signes Codoñer (2016) described in detail how grammarians throughout centuries struggled to explain the volatile dynamics of this middle voice.

Similar 'in-between' terms, namely, μεταξύ and μεσότης, served for a time as a designation for the neuter gender and the adverb, respectively. It was Antipater, the successor of the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon, who coined the term μεσότης (see Matthaios, 1999, pp. 548–556). This term was replaced only in the Alexandrian period by ἐπίρρημα, of which the current English term adverb is a loan translation through the Latin *adverbium*. Similarly, the word 'neutre' reflects the Latin loan translation of οὐδέτερον ('neither', viz. Neither masculine nor feminine). This is the term that succeeded μεταξύ, proposed by
Aristotle. Earlier still, Protagoras had put forward the name σκευή 'inanimate object, thing', suggesting that there was a natural relationship between the natural and grammatical gender—which, of course, clashed with reality (cf. section 2).

## 3.5 Syntax: Of Subordinate Importance?

That the Greek grammarians generally attached the greatest significance to the word level should not eclipse the fact that syntactic topics were explored as well. Yet there is no denying that traces of syntactic investigations, especially if compared to the Arabic and Indian grammatical traditions, are rather thin on the ground, even to the point of having been called a “black hole” in ancient language theory. While the term *syntaxaxis* was well established and in active use among ancient philosophers and grammarians, once again it is important to stress that this term has since taken on different interpretations (see Lambert, 2011). This is why the distance between ancient *syntaxaxis* and present-day *syntax* was much greater than one might suspect at first sight (Swiggers & Wouters, 2003, pp. 25–27).

We have already seen how Plato was interested in etymologies and their epistemological potential. He was not convinced that language in itself was a mirror of reality or an immediate gateway leading to knowledge. Language did, however, have an instrumental role to play in the search for truth (Law, 2003, p. 33; Schmitter, 2000, p. 363), given that sentences or propositions, in contrast to single or accumulated words, were considered to be the *locus* of truth (or the lack thereof). In order to test a sentence for its truthfulness, Plato distinguished in the *Sophist* two entities, which would be styled ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ today. However, he used terms that are not connected with syntactic categories, but rather with those formal categories that are used par excellence to represent ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’, namely noun (οἶνομα) and verb (ρῆμα). In other words, once one connects a noun with a verb, one obtains a statement, the truth of which can be examined (Swiggers & Wouters, 2015, pp. 761–762). Hence, this basic form of syntactic parsing was thus applied for logic aims.

The interest of the Stoics, who were the first to conduct systematic syntactic research, was still logically and philosophically motivated. They famously distinguished complete from incomplete utterances. Numerous relevant books are attributed to Chrysippus. The Alexandrians, in turn, conducted syntax research in the context of text criticism and philology. Our knowledge of Ancient Greek thought on syntax is largely based on a grammarian of the 2nd century CE, from whom an almost intact surviving treatise Περὶ συντάξεως has been transmitted. He is generally regarded as the inventor of the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs (Robins, 1993, p. 30). As indicated in section 6, Apollonius Dyscolus regularly informed his readers about his predecessors. Apollonius, moreover, enjoyed an excellent reputation in antiquity, but most of his work is a tough nut to crack for contemporary interpreters (perhaps the nickname *dyskolos* “troublesome” alludes to the hermetic nature of his writings). Jean Lallot (2006, p. 31) summarized Apollonius’s syntactic project as the study of the dynamics between the core parts of speech on the one hand (viz. the nucleus of noun and verb) and the secondary ones on the other. There is debate among scholars as to the extent to which Apollonius’s syntax is rooted in the Stoic school: the consensus seems to be that there is a discernible link, but that the philosophical perspective is absent from Apollonius’s writings. Sluiter (1990, p. 26; see also pp. 40–41) defends the view that in later grammar some concepts had become “cultural common coin” to the extent that the philosophical basis was “not felt as such any longer.” In addition, it is certain that the author created a framework that goes far beyond what one understands by syntax today, while in turn there is little evidence that any significance was attached to the understanding of ‘syntactic functions’, to offer just one example (Lallot, 2015; see also Schmidhauser, 2010).

The relative lack of interest in what we today regard as core syntactic issues has attracted the attention of researchers (Swiggers & Wouters, 2003, pp. 36–38, with further references). In part, this gap can be traced back to linguistic features of Greek itself: for instance, it is well known that the word order of Greek is very free. The fact that Greek language teaching
was aimed at native speakers and very much directed at the written word may also have contributed to this diminished attention. Furthermore, even though Apollonius's syntax remains primarily a 'grammar of the word' (a characterization by Donnet, 1967, p. 42), Lallot has pointed out that this word-centered focus does not preclude that attention is given to functions too, albeit in a less obvious way. "The 'words' that constitute sentences are not, for Apollonius, raw materials, like stones piled up to make a wall," Lallot argued. Instead, the parts of speech carry certain functionalities "that predispose them to play determined roles in the construction of sentences," making them "comparable to the parts that a technician removes when dismantling a machine, and that he can reuse, *while respecting their functions*, to repair or build another one" (Lallot, 2006, p. 35). Finally, it may be noted that the entities studied in the context of syntax are less visible than the entities of the letter and the word, and that syntactic issues were the playground not exclusively of grammarians but also of rhetoricians. In the Byzantine grammatical tradition, syntax would gradually come to the fore. There was, for instance, a growing awareness of the links between specific cases and specific place-related questions (the genitive being associated with the question 'from where', the dative with the question 'in which', etc.; cf. Picciarelli, 2003; and, more in general, Robins, 1993). The 6th-century scholar Priscian, an enthusiast student of Apollonius's works and the author of the very influential *Institutiones grammaticae*, introduced syntax as a new part of Latin grammar in the Medieval West.

## 3.6 Virtues and Vices: Yardsticks for Language Correctness

In addition to describing the various units of the language, grammarians were also interested in assessing the grammatical correctness of these units in use. In the Greek world the term ἑλληνισμός (*Hellenismos*) was employed for this normative activity. Baratin and Desbordes (1987, p. 53) described an interest in ἑλληνισμός as an examination of "what is properly Greek in Greek, [...] irrespective of the eras, places, occasions and persons who use them: it is to bring to light the common and invariable properties of the language." This part of grammar may seem to have an applied and hands-on approach, but as such it was rooted in old philosophical discussions addressed in section 2. In addition, the intrinsic intersections with rhetoric are obvious. Around 100 BCE, specialized theoretical monographs on *Hellenismos* emerged (Pagani, 2015, p. 814, who also provided a general overview). In the Latin tradition, this part would evolve into an independent third part of the grammatical building, in addition to 'phonetics' and 'morphology' (on its gradual development, see Baratin & Desbordes, 1987).

Of course, one of the most controversial issues in this field concerned the criteria to be used when evaluating a Greek word or word combination. In a seminal book, Siebenborn (1976) distinguished three main criteria, namely, analogy, literary tradition, and linguistic usage. These criteria could, of course, be at odds with each other (Siebenborn, 1976, p. 97). There was, for instance, a friction between the latter two, because Homer, whose language was very far removed from general usage, had a starring role in literary education. But above all, the so-called Analogy- Anomaly controversy has drawn attention. The analogical criterion mainly aimed at "deducing the unknown from the similar known. Such a procedure presupposes," Siebenborn explained (1976, pp. 97–98)

an awareness of laws in the morphological structure of language. This prerequisite, and thus the validity of the analogical procedure itself, is disputed by the Pergamenian grammarians, by Krates and his followers, with reference to the irregularities of common usage.

This leads to the question of whether or not this debate took place in reality, and against which backdrop it exactly should be understood (Matthaios, 2018b and further references).
## 4. Lexicography

"Of the ancient authors, many others have compiled alphabetical lexicons too." These are the opening words of Hesychius of Alexandria in his succinct letter to Eulogius, which precedes as a dedication the impressive dictionary, presumably compiled around 500 CE. The author may thus already have had one foot in the Byzantine world, but nevertheless Hesychius is considered a pivotal figure in classical Greek lexicography—an opinion that he himself would probably gladly endorse.² In the remainder of the preface, Hesychius argued that there had been lexicographers who had devoted themselves to explaining Homeric vocabulary or that of the comedians and tragedians. But as yet there was no one who had combined all this. Before dwelling on the work of Hesychius, this section discusses the accomplishments of his predecessors—insofar as traces remain. Hesychius’s preface, in which he sheds light on the lexicographical praxis of bygone centuries, is helpful in this regard.

From as early as the 5th century BCE onward, Greeks examined their vocabulary with special interest. As the centuries passed, the Greek 'classics', such as the works of the lyric and epic authors, had become increasingly more hermetic for native speakers. Homer's epics occupied a central place in the Greek educational system, and thanks to some fragments by Aristophanes we know that interrogating difficult Homeric words was part and parcel of daily teaching practice (Matthaios, 2007, pp. 13–14). Against this background, there was a growing need for specialized dictionaries of "Ancient Greek." An example is the work Γλῶσσαι Ὀμηρικαί ("difficult Homeric words") by the scholar Apion, who was active around the beginning of our era and who is also referred to in Hesychius's introduction. According to specialists, lexicographical activity in the Greco-Roman world took three forms: 'glossaria', 'lexica' and 'onomastica' (Ferri, 2019, p. 84; cf. also Tosi, 2015).

The lemmata in a 'glossary' are arranged in the order in which the words appear in the source text under study. Еrotianus produced a now lost glossary of originally Hippocratic words from 37 different works: today we still have a shortened version in partly alphabetical order. In a 'lexicon' the lemmata are arranged alphabetically—or rather, semi-alphabetically: until the Byzantine period, words were often ordered by the first two or three letters only. An 'onomasticon' then groups lemmata into semantic fields. According to Renzo Tosi, the latter approach was certainly the most common, while attempts at arriving at an alphabetical order remained very modest (Tosi, 2015, p. 623). Whereas Greek dictionaries, compared to our current dictionaries, sometimes had a broader scope in their microstructure (in many cases, encyclopedic information was provided too), the ambitions on the macro level tended to be much more limited. One must not lose sight of the fact that these works were produced by Greeks for Greeks. Hence, being comprehensive by including all sorts of frequent and trivial words would yield no added value and would first and foremost give way to considerable material difficulties. The lexicographical activity, multifaceted and original in nature (Matthaios, 2007), was, therefore, as a rule, selective and tailored to specific themes or authors. Ferri (2019, p. 102) suggested that the gradually growing awareness of the opportunities offered by comprehensive dictionaries should be seen against the backdrop of the increasing number of bilingual Latin-Greek dictionaries. For a long time, however, the context remained monolingual, while the bilingual lexicographical activity, conceived as more practical and attested on papyri from the beginning of our era, was ignored by the leading philologists (Ferri, 2019, p. 93).

A pioneering role was certainly played by Aristophanes of Byzantium, who was in charge of the famous Alexandrian library around 200 BCE. A lack of sources clouds the specifics of his contribution to lexicography, but everything suggests that his sphere of interest was very broad—for instance, he concerned himself with epigraphic texts, dialect forms, and register differences (Ferri, 2019, pp. 87–89). Although the Greeks actively distinguished several dialects used in literary texts, the notion that several dialects were subordinate to one overarching language only became commonplace much later (Morpurgo-Davies, 1987; Van Rooy, 2021; see also Tribulato, 2019 for a survey of the attitudes toward the different dialects in antiquity). For older lexicographers we are even more in the dark. For example, of Sim(m)ias of Rhodes, a glossographer active around 300 BCE, only four fragments have been preserved, which show an interest in dialect words (Meliadò, 2015). The period of the so-called Second Sophistic generated a significant amount of lexica. The emphasis was now on explaining
Attic words that were no longer in vogue. A purist at heart was Phrynichus Arabius, for whom only a limited circle of Attic authors was acceptable, namely, the three tragedians, Aristophanes, Plato, Demosthenes, Thucyrides, and Xenophon. One of his two (partly) preserved works, with the significant title *Praeparatio sophistica*, is an Atticist syntactic lexicon, which also pays attention to idiomatic constructions and valence schemes of verbs (but in my view somewhat in a lesser degree than Ferri, 2019, p. 97 suggested). Here are two illustrative examples:

* κεχαρισμένως θύειν: τὸ μετὰ χάριτός τινος καὶ εὐφροσύνης (commenting Aristoph. *Acharn*. 248: “κεχαρισμένως θύειν: with certain thanks and good cheer”)

* ὄστινον: δεῖ λέγειν, οὐκ ὄστεῖνον (commenting Aristoph. *Acharn*. 863: “ἔστινον: one should say ὄστινον, and not ὄστεῖνον”)

These two examples also illustrate some striking features of ‘academic Greek’. The sentences are very concise, and their elliptical succinctness sometimes makes them difficult to understand. In addition, accessibility is often hampered by the technical jargon, which also encompasses syntactic peculiarities. For example, the use of the article is extremely versatile: it regularly serves as an inverted comma. Moreover, when the full inflection of a noun is given, the article can be used economically to indicate gender, number, and case (see Dickey, 2007 for more details).

However, not all Attic dictionaries were purist. An anonymous dictionary, surviving at the beginning of the tradition as ἄλλος ἀλφάβητος ('another alphabetical dictionary'), obtained in more recent times the somewhat unfortunate title *Antiatticista*. Everything suggests that the compiler of this work had different ideas from Phrynichus, but it remains unclear whether Phrynichus in his work criticizes the *Antiatticista* or whether the anonymous author of the *Antiatticista* denounced Phrynichus (Valente, 2015, pp. 53–54). In any case, the compiler is somewhat more open-minded by approving a number of words and expressions that were sufficiently present in classical texts (Matthaios, 2020, pp. 367–368; cf. Valente, 2015).

In addition to this semi-alphabetically arranged material, ‘onomastica’ continued to be produced in the later period. In the 2nd century CE, Herennius Philo compiled a glossary of synonyms and homonyms—a subject that had attracted attention from the very beginning of Greek thinking about language, as sophists such as Prodicus sought to establish a one-to-one relationship between words and meaning (Sluiter, 1990, pp. 6–7). However, the onomastic genre is mainly represented by Julius Pollux (fl. 2nd century CE) in his 10-book *Ονομαστικόν*. The second book contained the following word field related to procreation: σπέρμα σπορά. σπεῖραι, ἀρόσαι, καταβαλεῖν τὸ σπέρμα, ὑποδέξασθαι, κυῆσαι, γεννῆσαι, τεκεῖν. ἔμβρυον, κύημα, ἀνεμιαῖον κύημα, τρόφιμον, βιώσιμον. τὸ δὲ κύημα καὶ κύος Ἀριστοφάνης κέκληκεν. The reader will recognize sperm, followed by some verbs (in the aorist stem) that refer to the sex act, pregnancy, and giving birth. A final row contained nouns referring to the fetus (with ‘embryo’ still in use today). Pollux concluded with the fact that Aristophanes used κύος as an alternative to κύημα (one of the many words the Greeks knew for fetus). It typifies Pollux that he also made room in his work for comments on semantic shifts, observations, and personal discoveries (Ferri, 2019, p. 101). In the 5th century CE, the first Greek etymological dictionaries were compiled—a genre that reached maturity especially in the Byzantine period (Tosi, 2015, pp. 633–634).

From the 2nd century onward, there was a tendency to combine these various types of specialized dictionaries and unify them into universal dictionaries—the lexicographers of the imperial period thus generally took a different path from their Hellenistic predecessors, who had adopted an approach of specialization (Matthaios, 2020, pp. 351–352). The already mentioned Hesychius is a representative of this imperial tradition. We owe our knowledge of Hesychius’s compilatory work to *the Codex Marcianus Graecus 622*—the identification number of the only preserved paper witness. And even though Hesychius’s work has been preserved in only one manuscript (from ca. 1430)—boiled down to about 51,000 entries with interpolations and omissions—it has taken a great deal of effort to produce a contemporary edition. Under the auspices of the Royal Danish Academy, Kurt Latte published the first volume in 1953. A second appeared posthumously in 1966.
Volumes 3 and 4 had to wait until 2005 and 2009. The laborious progress cannot be dissociated from the battered state of the manuscript and, above all, from its at times inaccessible contents, which drove first the Byzantine copyists and then the publishers to despair (Valente, 2019, p. 251). Three exemplary examples are:

* ἀρῶς· ἀριθμοῦ ὄνομα, παρὰ Πέρσαις [A 7607 Latte: “ἀρῶς: name of a number, among the Persians”]

* ἄσβεσε· διέφθειρε· Κρῆτες [A 7630 Latte: “ἄσβεσε: he has demolished. Cretes”]

* γοῖνος· οἶνος [Γ 784 Latte: “γοῖνος: wine”]

Like the scholia, dictionary entries always consist of two parts: the lemma is on the left, the *interpretamentum* on the right. In modern editions, both parts are usually distinguished in a typographical way. On papyri, the distinction between lemma and commentary was signaled, if at all, by working with different columns, a space, or punctuation (Tosi, 2015, p. 627; see further Ferri, 2019, pp. 85–86).

What these examples show very clearly is that Hesychius did not have a purist Attic reflex. The lexicographer placed great importance on the inclusion of dialectal words (*ἄσβεσε*, explicitly labeled as Cretan, and—more implicitly—*γοῖνος*) and even non-Greek words, such as the Persian word in the prior example. That this was anything but self-evident is shown in section 5.

## 5. Greek Views on Languages Other Than Greek

In a letter from 1714, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz twice expressed his disappointment at the lack of interest in foreign languages among classical scholars (published in Chamberlayne, 1715, pp. 22–30). This might have been the first time that a scholar put his finger on this blind spot in the Greeks’ otherwise broad sphere of interest. Needless to say, such an interest presupposes a sufficient exposure to foreign languages. But the ancient world was fundamentally multilingual. Trade routes, diplomatic envoys, and military confrontations led to frequent contacts with foreign-speaking powers (see, for example, Adams et al., 2002; Hall, 2002). Greek citizens eagerly undertook study trips to Egypt and, with increasing enthusiasm, incorporated Eastern gods into their pantheon. But as soon as other languages came into play, the famous Greek curiosity seemed to melt like snow in the sun. Although many Middle Eastern cultures had a flourishing tradition of translating texts, we know of hardly any foreign literary works translated into Greek (Ulshöfer, 2007), and it is almost certain that foreign languages were not on the Greek educational curriculum either (Rochette, 1995, p. 12; Werner, 1983, p. 591). As mentioned before, there was a certain disdain for Latin-oriented language work among Greek speakers (Ferri, 2019, p. 93), even though it is certain that following the annexation into the Roman Empire, Latin was eventually taught on a fairly large scale in the East as well (Dickey, 2012, 2015a; Scappaticcio, 2015). The complex relationship between Greek and Latin will not be discussed here, if only because there were theories circulating in antiquity about a possible Aeolian origin of Latin (see, e.g., Conduché, 2020). If this were already a widespread explanatory model—the indications for this are rather thin (Lamers, 2019)—then Latin, as a so-called Aeolian dialect, cannot be seen in isolation from Greek. Both Zenon and Chrysippos were originally speakers of Semitic languages, and this has given rise to the hypothesis that this contrastive background enabled the Stoics to make sharper linguistic analyses (Coscriu, 2015, pp. 109, 111).

There is not really a conclusive explanation for this striking gap in ancient scholarly thinking. Jürgen Werner did not exclude the possibility that in this area we may be plagued mainly by a lack of sources documenting scholarly activities relating to foreign languages (Werner, 1992, pp. 1–2). However, there seems to be more to it than that. Plutarch (Them. 6) recounted how Themistocles had an interpreter executed for using Greek in an inappropriate manner. Greek was considered to be a special language, and not everyone had the right to use it (Leiwo, 1996, p. 125). Themistocles was at the same time very exceptional in that he actively learned the language of the Persian administration, probably Aramaic. His fellow citizens
looked upon him with suspicion (Wiotte-Franz, 2001, p. 155). It is symptomatic that the few polyglots mentioned in Greco-Roman sources are outsiders—and in the cases of Mithridates and Cleopatra even public enemy number one (Laes, 2013). Herodotus, the so-called father of historiography, was praised for his open-minded view of other peoples and his anthropological interest. However, his observation that the Ethiopians ‘squawked like bats’, thus comparing a human language with animal sounds, is met with disapproval today (Van Hal, 2009). A fragment from Aristophanes equally suggested that foreign languages were considered to be ‘screamed’ or ‘shrieked’ rather than being ‘spoken’ (Novokhatko, 2020b, p. 28).

"The Greeks and Romans, too preoccupied with their mother tongue, were insufficiently aware of the value of studying foreign languages," Wilhelm von Humboldt would later judge (quoted after Reutter, 2011, p. 186). At the same time, Humboldt also showed that this disinterest need not be reduced entirely to pure complacency or to a striking language imperialism. In his view, it was quite understandable that ancient thinkers used to assume that the various languages of the world just used different words to describe the same objects and concepts that exist in the world (Reutter, 2011, p. 143). In Humboldt's view, classical scholars had made the mistake of reducing differences in languages to merely superficial differences in nomenclatures. Otherwise, he continued, they would certainly have proceeded to a more ambitious empirical collection of language data. Similar hypotheses can also be found in contemporary literature (Harrison, 1998, p. 20). In early Christian Greek literature, the specific context of the biblical culture (including translation and commentary traditions) led to a more active discussion of other languages (see Van Rooy, 2013). Just as all conditions for comparing languages had been met, there was nothing to prevent the Greeks from exploring the history of their language: they were familiar with 'history' in general and invested much of their time in the study of historical texts, with Homer on top. Nevertheless, a diachronic approach remained as absent as a comparative approach (Lallot, 2011).

## 6. Case Study and Outlook

This article has mainly identified linguistic domains and themes, while less attention was given to concrete actors and persons. A brief portrait of one Greek language specialist, Tryphon of Alexandria, will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between the domains studied here. In addition, it will also confront us with the many problems with which researchers are still struggling today.

About Tryphon's life we can say little more with certainty than that he was active during the time of Emperor August, perhaps in Alexandria, and that he was an incredibly productive scholar, of whom only very few fragments have come down to us, including one grammatical papyrus fragment (Τέχνη γραμματική, 'the art of grammar') that bears his name. Nor can we be confident that all the writings attributed to him, for example in the Suda, were actually his work.

Doxographic testimony is mainly found in scholia on Homer, in Athenaeus, and in later Byzantine work. But especially Apollonius Dyscolus often refers to his teacher. Putting all these pieces of the puzzle together, Tryphon appears to have commented intensively on the parts of speech: with certainty, for example, he worked on the participles and the category of 'person'. For example, he would have stated that the personal pronoun σύ was a vocative rather than a nominative. He must have had a good overview of the entire grammatical tradition. In addition, he also took an interest in issues of orthography and prosody. Tryphon's study of the dialects was embedded in his study of literary genres. The Suda mentions six books Περὶ πλεονασμοῦ τοῦ ἐν τῇ Αἰολίδι διαλέκτῳ ("About pleonasm in Eolic"), and there is evidence that he actively engaged in the study of Aeolian, Dorian, and Homeric Greek. Some preserved fragments also testify to Tryphon's lexicographical activity: he made "onomastica" of edible plants, animals, and musical instruments (Ippolito, 2015; Montana, 2020, pp. 256–259; Tosi,
2015, p. 624). He might have written a book on *Hellenismos* too (Pagani, 2015, pp. 816–817). Finally, he has also been characterized by some scholars as an early syntactician, yet all too precipitously in Matthaios’s (2003) view.

Tryphon, according to most scholars, represents the transition to a more specialized—and possibly more normative— approach to language. Multiple sections in this article have shown that for language-related issues, the attention of the Greeks in the first phases was mainly focused on what Elmar Siebenborn calls the “Außenbeziehungen der Sprache” (Siebenborn, 2000, p. 429). “The reflection on the internal structure [‘Binnenstruktur’] of language, as it emerged in Hellenism and led to a new discipline,” Siebenborn continued, “was necessary and useful: it led to a more systematic approach to language.” But at the same time, this trend could also have yielded an impoverishment: with the gradually stricter demarcation of disciplines, the grammarian’s playing field became rather narrow, and contacts with neighboring disciplines, primarily rhetoric and philosophy, became less and less osmotic.

A number of comments can be made here. Even for a specialized grammarian as Tryphon, language study remained instrumental in nature: grammar was seen first and foremost as an essential building block in education. It helped young citizens gain further training in the study of literature and rhetoric, thus paving the way for a career in public life. In addition, we must not lose sight of the fact that even after the emergence of grammar as an autonomous discipline, language reflection was not limited to the domain of grammaticography. It is true, however, that for a long time, historiographers of ancient linguistics dwelt mainly on these grammatical works. In the last quarter of the 20th century, for example, particular attention was paid to the emergence of the first real school grammars, such as the grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax (see, e.g., Swiggers & Wouters, 1998 for an edition with a German and Dutch translation). In contrast, the breadth of this article is more in line with a relatively recent international trend to significantly broaden the study of ancient meta-language thought. Research into grammatical work is increasingly embedded in a larger field, which can be summarized under the heading ‘texts about texts’. This somewhat broader view is reflected in the increasing frequency of the collocation ‘Ancient Greek scholarship’ in the titles of recent historiographic scholarly research (see, for example, Dickey, 2007; Montanari, 2020; Montanari, Matthaios, & Rengakos 2015). And, in addition, there are also many texts that fall outside the framework of this already widened field, and nevertheless contain interesting language-related information (e.g., texts of a historical, medical, philosophical nature).

The status of such ‘texts about texts’, as has become abundantly clear, is very precarious (Dickey, 2015b). It goes without saying that today we must make do with the limited surviving material. On papyrus, a number of direct testimonies is transmitted, the majority of which are, however, limited to school material, aimed at the study of classical authors. Scholia are often very hermetically formulated and strongly abbreviated, and on top of this subject to the dynamics of textual transmission. For most of these scholia collections, present-day editions are highly needed. Furthermore, for much of our knowledge, we are indebted to statements by later compilers. Only in rare cases, are these compilers willing to quote earlier authors verbatim. And even then, interpretation problems can occur. A striking example is Diogenes Laërtius, who in book 7 literally quotes the Stoic Diocles (1st century BCE). Unfortunately, there is great ambiguity about the end of the quotation, as it is not clear at what point Diogenes is taking over again (Law, 2003, p. 40).

But even the texts that have come to us have for a very long time remained untouched and unstudied. This has led not only to outdated text editions, but also to very limited visibility. This is not entirely self-evident, as may be shown by the following contrasting examples: the *editio princeps* of Hesychius appeared in 1514 from the Venetian presses of Aldus Manutius— hardly one year later than the *opera omnia* of Plato. The Loeb Classical Library has quite a few texts by medical authors (such as Galenus and Hippocrates), but no Dionysius Thrax or Hesychius. In short, compared to the ubiquity of ancient science and, of course, classical literature, ancient scholarship seems to fall between the cracks today.
## 7. Further Reading

Greek scholars have left a defining mark on present-day thinking about language. This influence is evident, among other things, from an age-long continuity in language terminology, which has its roots in classical and Hellenistic Greece. But great caution is required here: the continuity in contemporary names for terms such as ‘grammar’, ‘etymology’, ‘syntax’, and ‘dialect’ does not imply conceptual continuity. In a sense, these classical terms are almost ‘victims of their own success’, given that such labels are today often expected to cover a continuous conceptual content that corresponds to the contemporary one. It is therefore of great importance to carefully reconstruct the original contexts, which is a difficult task for 21st-century linguists, who are operating from entirely different frames and expectations (Colombat et al., 2010, p. 84). A promising avenue for future research might consist in a careful study of specific terms figuring both within and beyond the linguistic realm (see Sluiter, 1990, pp. 13–16, and the general design of Kotarcic, 2021)—new corpus linguistic approaches offer novel perspectives in this regard.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing will probably enable us in the future to better map out the connections between texts about language and the connections with other kinds of texts. To be welcomed, then, are digital edition projects of Ancient Greek “texts about texts,” which can only further stimulate research. It has also become clear that the study of language in antiquity predated the emergence of grammar books by several centuries, and that it consequently encompassed much more than grammar. The topic of Greek dialects, for instance, was treated in grammatical works as well as in historical works, but it is interesting to see that ethnogenetic aspects tended to remain entirely absent from the grammatical works (Conduché, 2020, p. 46). It is, however, safe to say that the grammar format, as designed by the Greeks, would become their most visible and fruitful contribution to subsequent Western and Eastern cultural traditions. The influential grammars of Donatus and Priscianus were modeled on Greek blueprints, with typically Greek components (such as ἐλληνισμός) replaced by Latin equivalents (such as *Latinitas*).

Vivien Law (2003) offered a very readable introduction to the history of language thought up to 1600. A recent book by Peter Matthews (2019) showed what one can learn from the approach of the ancient grammarians today. In the series *Orbis supplementa*, Pierre Swiggers and Alfons Wouters have edited several volumes devoted to grammaticographical topics. Herbermann (1991) and Baratin (1991) are part of a significant collected volume devoted to language theories in antiquity, in a series edited by Peter Schmitter. Baratin & Desbordes (1987) were published in a volume with a similar scope. Schmitter (2000) and Siebenborn (2000) were published in a substantial three-volume companion on the history of linguistics, containing further chapters devoted to the Ancient Greek legacy. An incredibly prolific scholar who approaches Ancient Greek thought on language as an integral part of Ancient Greek Scholarship is Franco Montanari (he is also known in wider circles for the recent English-language dictionary of Ancient Greek). A treasure trove of information can be found in the two-volume *Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship* (Montanari, Matthaios, & Rengakos, 2015). An updated version of the historical part of this *Companion* was recently published as *History of Ancient Greek Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the Byzantine Age* (Montanari, 2020). At present, the *Lexicon of Greek Grammarians of Antiquity* (LGGA) is still under construction and is expected to be completed by 2023. This instrument, which provides bio-bibliographical information, a profile of the work, and the Greek text of the preserved fragments of 570 grammarians, is already largely available online (Montanari, Montana, & Pagani, 2015). This overview should not give the impression that relevant research began only in the 21st century. Most scholars regard H. Steinthal, author of *Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern* (1891–1892), as the founder of the field, while the series *Grammatici Graeci*, edited by G. Uhlig and others, laid important empirical foundations. Siebenborn (1976, pp. 1–13) offered a good review of older literature, where however no mention is made of Robins (1951/1971), which is, despite its age, an instructive read.
1. This article is partly based on a public lecture in Dutch, which appeared in edited form in the journal *Tetradio* (Van Hal, 2020). For the sake of readability, I have turned non-English quotations into English myself. Two anonymous reviewers have offered very instructive remarks on a previous draft of this article, for which I want to express my gratitude. Any errors are of course my own responsibility.

2. It is symptomatic that in the recent *Cambridge World History of Lexicography*, Hesychius is extensively discussed in both the chapter on the Greco-Roman world and the one on the Byzantine world (Ferri, 2019; Valente, 2019). Of the Byzantine lexicographical activity, which was very impressive and multifaceted, many traces have been preserved. For this section, I draw primarily on Dickey (2007), Ferri (2019), Pantelia (2013), and Tosi (2015).

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