The “Kühner-Stegmann” of 1914 and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” of 2015 and 2021: Comparing Two Examples of a Latin syntax of Different Times and Different Approaches

Abstract

Comparing the grammars of so-called dead languages is particularly fascinating. The article compares two syntactic accounts from completely different time periods — a traditional and still well-known one from the 19th century and a modern one that has currently been published: the syntactic part of the “Ausführliche Grammatik der Lateinischen Sprache” by Raphael Kühner from 1878 and 1879, and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” by Harm Pinkster from 2015 and 2021. First, the general concepts are introduced: Karl Ferdinand Becker’s theory of the three syntactic relations (2.1), S. H. A. Herling’s theory of the equivalence of sentence parts and subordinate clauses (2.2), as well as the modern functional approaches of the theory of the simple clause (3.1) and the complex sentence (3.2). Six differences between the two Latin syntactic concepts are discussed. Three common aspects are taken into consideration, namely the corpus-based approach, the restriction to a single language, and the purely descriptive method as opposed to a normative or more formal approach. Among the results, it is concluded that both grammatical systems of the Latin syntax are legitimate and both should be used to address questions concerning Latin syntax.