Old grammatical nomenclatures as a source of grammatical knowledge

Abstract

The subject of the analysis are terms recorded in the 17th–19th-century grammar nomenclatures. The most numerously represented ones were terms from the field of inflection (naming parts of speech and grammatical categories), there were few terms from the field of phonetics and word-formation, and terms from the field of sentence syntax had not appeared in glossaries until the 19th century. This share of terms from various branches was determined by the utilitarian nature of grammatical works: they were intended for learning Polish or foreign languages. It was assumed a priori, so to speak, that the learner already had the knowledge of the rules of Latin grammar, and the point of reference for Polish terms (or German ones, as in Dobracki’s grammar book) was the Latin terminology. The outcome of the development of grammatical knowledge is the redefinition of grammar itself and its branches, the independence of the grammatical description of modern languages from Latin grammar, as well as the codification and standardisation of grammatical terminology.