Latin Grammar Research Articles

A/the Common Good

Abstract The emerging school of “common good constitutionalism” takes a classical natural law approach of identifying the central case of law and constitutionalism, recognizing that a state may make positive law in part based on circumstance, convenience, or a need for social coordination. While law under the classical approach is rooted in realizing the common good of the complete community, this ideal does not dictate all of law’s specifics. Nevertheless, there is a difficulty within the emerging school of common good constitutionalism in the way it seeks to respect the diversity of constitutional orders while retaining a single reference point of the common good. Adrian Vermeule and others appeal to positive law as the determinatio through which public authorities make concrete the state’s pursuit of the common good. But there is often a gulf between common good principles and the determinatio of law. The move from principles to the legitimacy or justness of positive law lies, for Vermeule, in joining-up the central case method of natural law with a singular notion of the common good. The article criticizes this reliance, arguing that the central case method cannot be used to determine law in the sense of the determinatio of positive law. In his articulation of central case methodology, John Finnis is, by contrast, careful to leave space for varieties of coordination and forms of justice, such that the central case method plays a limited role in establishing what counts as common goods. Rather, the central case method identifies what law is. The same delicacy is present in Aquinas, who does not in fact define law as an ordinance of reason for the common good in the way that common good constitutionalists so far would like it to mean, because there are no articles in Latin grammar. In this regard, common good constitutionalism’s mistake is unfortunately in keeping with the majority of jurisprudence, which commits the logical fallacy that an internally consistent account of law is externally authoritative—in other words, that harmony in the way in which laws and legal principles relate to themselves can act as a basis to the body politic’s prioritization of some goods over others.

PROFESSOR IVAN TSVETAEV AND HIS METHODS OF THE EPIGRAPHIC RESEARCH: INTERPRETATION OF THE BRONZE FROM FALERII NOVI (CIL I2.365)

Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev (1847-1913) was an outstanding Russian сlassical philologist, art historian and archaeologist, professor at the Moscow State University. He was known as the founder of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts. As a researcher, Tsvetaev was interested in Latin literature and Italic languages. The article is based on the linguistic analysis and interpretation of bronze tablet from Falerii Novi (CIL I2.365), published by Tsvetaev in the Ministry of Public Education journal in November 1883. Tsvetaev’s article is supplemented with comments of modern reading and explanation of some linguistic features, the historical grammar of Latin and other Italic languages, as well as a modern interpretation of the text and linguistic characteristics of the inscription language, which is still the subject of discussion. The article reveals an outstanding role of Tsvetaev in the development of the studies in Italic languages.

Old grammatical nomenclatures as a source of grammatical knowledge

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.

Multilingual glossing and translanguaging in John of Garland’s Dictionarius: The case of Bruges, Public Library, MS 536

Based on an edition of the multilingual glosses, this paper investigates a copy of John of Garland’s Dictionarius extant in Bruges, Public Library, MS 536. This copy, written around AD 1300, perhaps in the vicinity of Bruges, includes some 800 interlinear glosses in Latin, Middle French and Middle English. The glosses target the lexicon and also basic Latin grammar. The linguistic characteristics of the glosses indicate that at least some of the glossators were competent in French as well as in English. Many of the lexemes of the French glosses are attested as loanwords in early Middle English; moreover, there are at least 30 instances of double glosses with French and English. As such, we argue that the glossators used “translanguaging” as a didactic strategy, and that the manuscript may have been created, for instance, for English students planning to study in Paris.

Soluzioni per il markup dell’apparato critico: il caso della Latin Grammarians Collection

Starting with the case of the Latin Grammarians Collections, currently under development using the Cadmus system as part of the PRIN 2017 The Transmission of Ancient Linguistics, ERC AdG-2019 PAGES and Thesaurus dubii sermonis project (Sapienza Università di Roma 2018-von Humboldt Stiftung 2020), this article aims to reflect on the challenges posed by the markup of the critical apparatus. The initial section begins by providing a status quaestionis concerning the digitisation of Latin grammatical texts and the annotation of the critical apparatus. Subsequently, the second part delves into the workflow for marking up the critical apparatus using Cadmus.

A Double Voice on Latin Grammar, or a Gloss to Reflections on the Challenges of Cultural Pedagogy

The aim of the article was to demonstrate, referring to the arguments taken from the correspondence and essays of Jerzy Stempowski and Bolesław Miciński, that humanistic education (actually: humanistic formation) still can and should be the foundation of the educational process. The title “Latin grammar” functions here as pars pro toto of culture. Knowledge of classical patterns – attitudes, actions, creation, or destruction of social structures – enables communication and creates the basis for formulating projects of the future. The protagonists of the article remind us about the basic culture forming aspect of tradition – collective memory and individual attitude to it. They also point to individual responsibility as a distinguishing feature of the Mediterranean culture

Lognom, Assisting in the Decision-Making and Management of Zoological Nomenclature

Nomenclature is the discipline of taxonomy responsible for managing the scientific names of groups of organisms. It ensures continuity in the transmission of all kinds of data and knowledge accumulated about taxa. Zoologists use the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1999), currently in its fourth edition. The Code contains the rules that allow the correct understanding and application of nomenclature, e.g., how to choose between two names applying to the same taxon. Nomenclature became more complex over the centuries, as rules appeared, disappeared, or evolved to adapt to scientific and technological changes (e.g., the inclusion of digital media) (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 2012). By adhering to nomenclatural rules, taxonomic databases, such as the Catalogue of Life (Bánki et al. 2023), can maintain the integrity and accuracy of taxon names, preventing confusion and ambiguity. Nomenclature also facilitates the linkage and integration of data across different databases, allowing for seamless collaboration and information exchange among researchers. However, unlike its final result, which is also called a nomenclature, the discipline itself has remained relatively impervious to computerization, until now. Lognom*1 is a free web application based on algorithms that facilitate decision-making in zoological nomenclature. It is not based on a pre-existing database, but instead provides an answer based on the user input, and relies on interactive form-based queries. This software aims to help taxonomists determine whether a name or work is available, whether spelling rules have been correctly applied, and whether all the relevant rules have been respected before a new name or work is published. Lognom also allows the user to obtain the valid name between several pre-registered candidate names, including the list of synonyms and the reason for their synonymy. It also includes tools for answering various nomenclatural questions, such as determining if two different species names with the same derivation and meaning should be treated as homonyms; if a name should be treated as a nomen oblitum under Art. 23.9 of the Code; and another tool to determine a genus-series name's grammatical gender. Lognom includes most of the rules regarding availability and validity, with the exception of those needing human interpretation, usually pertaining to Latin grammar. At this point of its development, homonymy is not completely included in the web app, nor are the rules linked to the management of type-specimens (e.g., lectotypification, neotypification), outside of their use in determining the availability of a name. With enough data entered by the users, Lognom should be able to model a modification of the rules and calculate its impact on the potential availability or spelling of existing names. Other prospectives include the possibility of working simultaneously on common projects, which should lead to dynamic lists of available names, as well as automatically extracting nomenclatural data from pre-existing databases, where relevant information is disseminated. A link to attach semantic web labels to names throughout Zoonom (Saliba et al. 2021) or NOMEN (Yoder et al. 2017) is also under consideration.

Grammatisation and changes in Turkish language teaching in the 19th and 20th centuries: mood and tense in textbooks

ABSTRACT The development and diffusion of written media in the Ottoman world resulted in further dissemination of education, which led to several competitive methodological attempts in the teaching of the Turkish language. The development of grammar and dictionaries became the tools of the new state’s educational policies. As Arabic was the focus of language education in the classical Ottoman world, the grammar of Ottoman Turkish was first analysed through Arabic categories and definitions. Greco-Latin grammatical categories, which classified morphological items and syntactic segments, helped to create categories in order to facilitate the simplification and the standardisation of grammar, substantially supported by the state. In this study, we examine the process of grammatisation of the Turkish language and the switch between two grammatisations, from extended Arabic grammar to extended Latin grammar. By examining a corpus of 28 manuals, we try to clarify the transformation of teaching methods, from the 19th to the 20th century, with a particular focus on tenses and moods. We conclude that some ambiguity regarding the description of Turkish grammar and its terminology still persist due to emerging new versions of extended grammar categories.

Latin Grammarians as Lexicographers: The Treatment of Nouns with Uncertain Gender

Abstract Several late antique Latin grammatical works encompass material drawn from the ancient erudite linguistic speculation De Latinitate and De dubio sermone, ultimately dating back to Pliny the Elder. The most prominent formal feature of the concerned texts is their lexicographical structure, i.e. the presence of a series of highlighted lemmata accompanied by examples and explanations. Furthermore, most of the works concerned show traces of the alphabetical arrangement of their common source. This paper presents the results of a preliminary survey of the texts dealing with nominal gender: particular attention is paid to the ways in which each late antique grammarian adapts the common source according to his specific interests. This inquiry comes out of a larger research project, which aims at producing a digital critical collection (thesaurus) of grammatical passages dealing with the dubius sermo. This repertory is intended to overcome the limits of the traditional printed collections of grammatical fragments.

Expressing pain from the Antiquities to the Middle Ages: Heu as a part of speech

AbstractThe interjection was recognised as a part of speech by the Latin grammarians, replacing the lack of the article class in the Greek system and maintaining the eight parts of speech. However, it is noteworthy that the definition of interjection among the different scholars and grammarians is not stable and wavers between the need to identify its role as a part of speech – whether it was an adverb or not – and its pragmatic function, identifying to what extent it was connected to emotions. The scholarly discussion over the interjection entangled and disentangled itself during the centuries, and its theoretical status has been verified in the present paper, which shows how the classical and non-classical evidence reconnects this part of speech to its most rhetorical function. This paper delves into this debate, focusing on the interjection heu and providing a history of the interjection, covering the classical period and the Middle Ages, according to the linguistic perspective and highlighting how Latin grammarians considered it in their linguistic framework.

Thomas Robertson and the Pedagogical Uses of Erasmus in Early Tudor Grammar Schools

Abstract Erasmus’ educational theories were popularized during the first half of the sixteenth century by a group of Tudor educators, who used the medium of elementary Latin grammars and introductory phrasebooks to offer practical tools for a multilingual literary culture that would come to full fruition in the second half of the sixteenth century. Their teaching notes and school commentaries that survive in their annotated textbooks provide a valuable source with which to trace how Erasmian methods of teaching were actually put into practise. Among these early educators is an obscure figure of English educational history, Thomas Robertson (fl. c. 1520–1561), headmaster of Magdalen College School in Oxford from 1526 to 1531, who devised the most thorough and comprehensive Erasmian program in his annotated edition of William Lily’s elementary grammar De Latinorum nominum generibus (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1532). In many ways, Robertson’s edition of Lily’s grammar epitomizes Erasmus’ grammatical encyclopedism expounded in De ratione studii and De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, which inadvertently resulted in a fundamental reinterpretation of textual studies in the Tudor classroom. It furthermore testifies to Robertson’s efforts to promote Erasmus’ trilingual ideal: a parallel Latin and Greek instruction, which was extended even to basic Hebrew from an early age.

The French aorist in sixteenth-century grammar, or how to make the best of a bad Greek concept

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that sixteenth-century French grammarians subtly adapted the Greek concept of aorist to their native language in order to fill a gap left by past tense descriptions in Latin grammar. In this French aorist concept, they amalgamated features today associated with tense and aspect. I start out by recalling the origin of the aorist concept in Greek antiquity, Byzantium, and the Italian Renaissance. Then I look at French grammarians’ dealings with their past tense system, and especially how they inserted the aorist into it. I focus on the French grammatical tradition up to Henri Estienne’s well-known Traicté de la conformité du language françois auec le grec (1565). My main conclusion is that French grammarians made the best of a bad Greek concept, primarily out of a descriptive need, and only secondarily in order to give a Hellenic aura to French, even though the latter was fashionable in sixteenth-century France. As such, these grammarians developed a new language-particular concept rather than merely transposing the Greek concept to the French context.

The development of the concept of ʽevidentialityʼ and its exogenous application to European languages

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘evidentiality’ is the only example of an exogenous application of a category derived from the description of Amerindian languages to the description of European languages. In this contribution, first the consideration of evidentiality in ancient descriptions of American Indian languages is addressed. The missionaries followed the model of Latin grammars, but in some cases, they realised that these languages were substantially different. Without perceiving the systematic value of the evidentials, some missionaries grouped them in different classes constituted by elements that had particular meanings and that were different from the European languages. Second, the emergence of the concept of ‘evidentiality’ as an obligatory element in certain languages is studied. Third, the integration of evidentiality into functional and pragmatic linguistics is analysed.

(233–240) Proposals on orthography: Epithets honouring persons

(233–240) Proposals on orthography: Epithets honouring persons

An Irradiation of Latin Grammarians, or The De radiis is not by al-Kindī

This article takes another look at the deeply problematic attribution to al-Kindī.of the well known philosophical text De radiis. Focusing on the use of grammatical terminology that occurs throughout the De radiis, the article demonstrates that the author of this text is drawing on (and thinking in terms of) common textbooks written by Latin grammarians. It is demonstrated that theonly person who could possibly have written the De radiis is an author steeped in Latin writings and schooled in Latin grammar, which means that the author could not have been anything other than a Christian European scholar, probably writing in the 1250s or 1260s, perhaps in England, in the academic milieu of Oxford.

«ПИР СЛОВЕСНОСТИ». НИКОЛАЙ АЛЕКСЕЕВИЧ ФЕДОРОВ: КАК ОБУЧИТЬ ИСКУССТВУ ПЕРЕВОДА В ПРОЦЕССЕ ПРЕПОДАВАНИЯ ЛАТИНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The article discusses the principles of translation from Latin, developed by Nikolaу A. Fedorov (1925–2016), the legendary teacher of Moscow University, while teaching Latin. He played a significant role in the formation of many generations of classical philologists. His teaching career at Moscow State University lasted 70 years. The article also examines the role and place of Fedorov's translations in the history of Russian translation culture. We explore the origins of the Moscow school of translation of classical philologists, the development of this school and its continuity in the work of Nikolay A. Fedorov. No less important is another aspect: the formation of the principles of translation in inseparable connection with the methodology of teaching Latin. The article describes the method of presentation of Latin grammar in the "classic textbook of Moscow State University", created in collaboration with Valentina I. Miroshenkova. In Russia, the textbook has been in demand for almost half a century and has survived 27 editions. In the pedagogical practice of Nikolai A. Fedorov, teaching Latin grammar and teaching translation are inextricably linked. Early acquaintance of students with complex Latin syntax is of great importance here. Fedorov has raised a whole galaxy of professional translators. The opinions of Nikolay A. Fedorov's students, who have become prominent philologists, about his teaching the art of translation in Latin classes are given. And we also give fragments of texts by Mark Tullius Cicero, Ambrose of Mediolansky and Jan Amos Komensky translated by N. Fedorov, which demonstrate the range of the translator (from the 1st century BC to the 17th century), the quality and skill of translation. The translator preserves with maximum accuracy all the structural features of the author's text. And at the same time, Fedorov, finding the necessary lexical equivalents, brings historical texts closer to the modern reader, making all the nuances of meanings clear to the reader.

O conceito de letra nas gramáticas de Fernão de Oliveira (1536), João de Barros (1540) e Anchieta (1595): Uma leitura historiográfica

Thetheme of the article is the concept of letter in the humanistic grammar of the 16th century, which derives from an adaptation of the concept of 'litera' in Latin grammar. To develop this debate, we work with texts by Fernão de Oliveira, João de Barros and Anchieta, analyzing them according to the theoretical description of Sylvain Auroux, Konrad Koerner and Pierre Swiggers, on the subject of grammatization technology in the Western world.

Consonant epenthesis in Latin

Abstract This paper intends to focus on two aspects: how the Latin grammarians developed the concept of epenthesis, and how we can now give an explanation to this phenomenon. After having gathered the phonological evidence from the tradition of Latin philology, we propose that, in prehistoric Latin, the epenthesis of -t- in the -s.r- cluster, and the epenthesis of -p- in the -m.l- cluster, aimed at solving some problems in syllabification, that is avoiding an illicit syllable onset and an illicit coda-onset sequence, respectively. We then observe that, in classical Latin, the only productive process is the epenthesis of -p- in the -m.s- and -m.t- clusters, which has the function of fulfilling the faithfulness constraint on the inflection of the -m- stems, blocking the m > n assimilation process that later took place in the evolution from Latin to Italian.

The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland

The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland

A Jesuit Grammar in the Anglican London of King James II: The First English Edition of Manuel Álvares’ Latin Grammar (1686–1687)

ABSTRACT With its original division into three books, the Latin grammar Emmanvelis Alvari è Societate Iesv de institvtione grammatica libri tres is one of the worldwide most influential Latin grammars ever since its ars maior and ars minor were first published in 1572 and 1573 by the Portuguese grammarian Manuel Álvares (1526–1583). This paper examines the way in which the three-volume English variant An Introduction to the Latin Tongue (Álvares 1686, I), Emmanuelis Alvari e societate Jesu Grammatica, sive institutionum Linguæ Latinæ Liber Secundus and Liber Tertius (Álvares 1687, II/III) came into being. Based on some key examples of grammatical description, an attempt is made to locate the origins of these volumes within the relevant national textual traditions of Alvaresian grammar.