Les noms des langues chez les Grecs

Abstract

Ancient Greeks used two terms to designate their language or languages : glōssa, which took on the meaning of language in modern Greek, and dialektos, which of course means dialect. But unlike the use of these terms in the modern languages, for the ancient Greeks they did not necessarily refer to the expected hierarchy : the grammarians used dialektos equally to designate any language or way of speaking, whereas glōssa refers rather to a word or an expression belonging to what we now call a dialect ! Amongst historians the two words are virtually equivalent and both refer to any language without any hierarchy. On the other hand, as far as the designation of languages is concerned, Greeks did not use, as we do, a nominalized form such as «Greek » or «Attic » . In fact they conceived their language and its different dialects, as much as the «barbarian » languages, as ways of speaking (dialektos) by different peoples. Finally it is clear that, even though it is premature to call the work achieved by Greek grammarians grammatisation, this did not prevent them from conceiving linguistic otherness in their own linguistic domain.