Page 523 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

in the Attic dialect or confined themselves to familiar Attic vocabulary. Aristotle (who probably provides the best evidence for the traditional lore of the schools in the Poetics, ch. 19-22: 1437a-59a) lists seven differ- ent kinds of poetic words, three of which involve the four 'transformations,' whose importance for Greek linguistics continues as one moves from Plato through to Apollonius Dyscolus. And as for dialects, all choral lyric poems were written in some form of Doric, solo lyrics in Aeolic, hexameter and elegiac poems in a kind of old Ionic with some Aeolic admixture. Choral lyric, in addition, often has a quite complex syntactic and metrical structure and unusual word order. It is improbable that the teachers have refrained for two or three hundred years from helping the students to understand the words and structures of these poems. Bear in mind what Protagoras says about education (Plato, Prof. 338e-39a) 'I think the greatest part of a man's education is to be expert on poetry, i.e., to be able to understand what is said by the poets, to tell whether or not it is properly written, and to know how to discriminate among poems and give an explanation when asked.' This is surely a fifth-century belief; and, as he says earlier, 'if you should advertize for a teacher of Greek (hellSnizeiri), not one would show up.' Of course, that is exactly what teachers did claim to teach in the days of Sextus Empiricus, six centuries later. But in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries, they taught what Protagoras wanted; when the students grew up, as gentlemen of leisure, they had to put up a good show of being experts on poets and poetry. Never- theless, the two basic sins, barbarizein and soloikizein, are mentioned early, the latter in Herodotus 4.117.1, and both in Aristotle Soph.El. 165b2.
2. The Sophists
Besides the schools of the grammarians, the fifth cen- tury BC saw the rise of higher education, the schools of the sophists. What they taught was mainly what later became rhetoric, essentially the principles of writ- ing good prose. While the Greek of the grammarians' schools was unlike their students' native dialect, that dealt with by most of the sophists was that very native dialect. But they rarely considered this from a gram- matical or linguistic viewpoint. And, while the gram- marians dealt with the rhythms of poetry, sophists might dispute about the appropriate rhythms for prose, especially at the ends of sentences (clausulae, to use the Latin name). In vocabulary they did not need to interpret rare or dialect words, but they did assign great importance to discriminating synonyms, and (in general) defining abstract words.
One sophist stands out above the rest for his interest in grammar, Protagoras, about whom tantalizing bits of information come from Plato and Aristotle, as well as Diogenes Laertius. He first distinguished four types of sentence—wish/prayer, question, answer, com- mand (Diogenes Laertius 9.53; Quintilian, Inst.
3.4.10)—and reprehended Homer (Aristotle Poetics 1456b, 15-18) for using the imperative ('command') in prayer to a goddess instead of the optative ('pray- er'). This criticism of course depends on the pre- existence of the name euktike (from euchomai, 'I pray') for what one calls the 'optative mood.' In fact, Homer's use is the correct one: second-person prayers to divinities normally are in the imperative. And one can be reasonably sure that Protagoras used the four transformations (see Sect. 3), from Socrates' use of the term hyperbaton (transposition) in Plato's Protagoras (343F).
But the main contribution of Protagoras seems to have been in syntax, where a passage on solecism in Aristotle's Rhetoric (1407b) combined with one in his Sophistic Refutations (173b) seems to suggest that Pro- tagoras discussed errors of agreement (solecisms) in gender, for which he used (possibly from the tradition of the didaskaloi) the names 'males,' 'females,' and 'things,' (in that order); and also in number (Aristotle says 'many and few and one,' probably for 'many and two and one').
3. Plato
It is primarily from Plato (especially the Theatetus, Cratylus, Protagoras, and Sophist) that an idea of fifth-century state-of-the-art grammatical science is gained (with additional evidence from Aristotle's Poetics and other works). There are several reasons for believing that Plato is not proposing innovative ideas and terms of his own, but merely avoiding anachronism in presenting the conversations of Soc- rates and his friends.
Clearly, several features of later grammatical art must have been introduced in the fifth century or before.
(a) the four paths or transformations (addition— also known as pleonasm, redundancy, inser- tion, epenthesis, etc.; subtraction—deletion, ellipsis, elision, apheresis, etc.; substitution— enallage, hypallage, commutation, etc.; and permutation—transposition, metathesis, hyper- baton, anastrophe, etc.—in Plato Cratylus 394B, 414C-D, 426C, 432A, etc.) used for etymology, but also for morphology (in treating irregular inflexion) and syntax (as in Protagoras 343F).
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(b) The terms 'onomd and 'rhSma,' whether for
'noun' and 'verb' or 'subject' and 'predicate' (as often in Plato), and possibly 'arthrorf and 'sundesmos' (later meaning 'article' and 'con- junction,' but at first including prepositions and some other function words).
(c) The word ptdsis, at first meaning any inflected form (as in Aristotle), but later 'case,' and some names for the cases—either the later eutheia for the nominative (or perhaps Aristotle's klSsis),
Plato and His Predecessors
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