Occasional Surveys in the History of Greek Grammar: The Stoics

1. Ancient Grammar

Charting the history of the study of tense and aspect in Greek in the Ancient and Byzantine grammars is a difficult task simply because of the paucity of information about context, the small number of extant manuscripts, issues of dating & authorship, and general access to the requisite materials. All of this has resulted in the contemporary discussions of ancient grammar for New Testament Greek being rather polemic. The ancient voices on the subject include the Stoic philosophers, Dionysius Thrax, Apollonius Dyscolus, and the various scholia on them.

There is an unfortunate situation when we examine New Testament scholarship that has discussed ancient scholarship on the Greek verb. There has been a failure to sufficiently discuss questions of history and authorship surrounding the grammatical treatise attributed to Dionysius Thrax. For example, contrary to what we find in the work of New Testament scholars, the fact of the matter is that the consensus in linguistic historiography rejects Dionysius’ authorship for the main body of the work and the majority of the text is probably better dated to the 2^nd century CE rather than BCE.[1] Neither Porter nor Caragounis, the two New Testament scholars who discuss the ancient grammarians most thoroughly, deal satisfactorily with the issue. Both fail to adequately place the Stoics and Dionysius in context. In this light, it is extremely important for us to take seriously the observation by P. H. Matthew:

“Given the deficiencies in our sources, and the discrepancies between ancient categories of inquiry and our own, no survey of ancient linguistics can entirely escape a charge of distortion. A balanced history is not possible, or possible only at a general level.”[2]

Because of difficulties in accessing sources, much of the discussion of ancient grammars focusing as much on contemporary discussions of their work as they do on the ancient works themselves.

1.1 The Stoics

The Stoics were a philosophical movement originating in the 3^rd century BCE. While they were not focused on grammar, their work was influential in the history of linguistics. The challenge is that we are limited to secondary sources for knowledge of their approach.[3] They are an essential component for Porter’s conception of the history of research alongside the brief grammar of Dionysius Thrax, particularly for his understanding of 19^th century grammars.

The Stoics conception of the verb can be broken down into the diagram in figure 1.[4]

Figure 1	Past	Present	Future
Incomplete	παρῳχειμένος παρατατικός	ἐνεστώς παρατατικός	—
Complete	παρῳχειμένος συντελικός	ἐνεστώς συντελικός	—
Undefined	ἀόριστος	—	μέλλων

It is clear that the Stoics had both tense and aspect in mind with the distinctions between a predicate’s temporal state (as complete, incomplete, or undefined) and its temporal location (past, present, future). The former are, of course, aspectual categories and the latter are tense categories. There seems to be a small consensus that for the Stoics the tense categories are the primary ones.[5] The basic divisions are generally clear. The difference between the Present and the Perfect (and the Imperfect and Pluperfect) is one of telicity and the difference between the Perfect and Present versus the Pluperfect and Imperfect is one of temporal location. The basic claim of the Stoics with regard to the aorist and the future is not entirely clear, particularly how closely we can connect the Stoic’s ἀόριστος to the modern category of perfectivity, which involves the presentation of a given state-of-affairs as a whole. As Carlotta Smith writes, “The span of the perfective includes the initial and final endpoints of the situation: it is closed informationally.”[6] The first half of this definition might suggest that the modern conception of perfectivity is somehow distinct from the Stoic’s ἀόριστος. Alternatively, the second half of the definition (i.e. “closed informationally”) may very well share much in common with ἀόριστος, with its conception that the internal temporal makeup of the situation is inaccessible and thus undefined. At the very least, it seems that the Stoics view neither of the aorist or the future as making any reference to telicity one way or the other.[7]

One possible explanation might be that because of the telicity contrast between the present and the perfect, the Stoics (and later ancient grammarians) saw a need to place an emphasis not the inclusion of initial and final endpoints for the aorist, but on the informationally closed status. Under this reading of the Stoics, it is possible to still maintain our contemporary understanding of the aorist as perfective, while also accepting the distinction between these inflectional forms emphasized by these ancient grammarians.

Those familiar with Porter might note some major differences in terminology. Porter presents the Stoics as follows.[8]

Action	Time	Past (παρῳχειμένος)	Present (ἐνεστώς)	Future (μέλλων)
Incomplete (παρατατικός)	παρατατικός	ἐνεστώς	—
Complete (συντελικός)	ὑπερσυντέλικος	παρακείμενος	—
Undefined (ἀόριστος)	ἀόριστος	—	μέλλων

It appears that Porter has conflated the terminology of Dionysius Thrax with that of the Stoics (while discussing them separately). According to both Robins and Matthews the latter do not use the terms παρακείμενος (Perfect) and ὑπερσυντέλικος (Pluperfect), which have clearly originated from Dionysius. Porter’s scheme is based on the scholia on Dionysius Thraxe’s grammar compiled in I. Bekker, Anecdota Graeca. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1816), 2.891-2. It is possible that this connection with Dionysius’ grammar has influenced the terminological differences between Porter as compared with Robins and Matthews. As it stands, I have not yet had an opportunity to examine the scholia in Bekker for the Stoics.

In terms of Porter’s critique of the Stoics, he makes a few points, including questioning the general completeness and usefulness of their system. He writes,

“Most obviously, the Stoics have failed to develop a complete system that elucidates all the verbal forms and functions … since they are bound within a temporal framework similar to Dionysius’s. For example, the Aorist like the Future is left undefined, and it is not compared to the Present and Imperfect, but only to the Perfect and Pluperfect. And their categories make no reference to past-referring Presents or Perfects, present referring Imperfects and Pluperfects, as well as non-Indicative usage.”[9]

As a whole, this is an odd criticism. We do not begin to see anything like the modern medium-scale grammatical treatise until after the Renaissance, if not the Enlightenment. Fundamentally, such comprehensive grammars of the language did not begin to appear until there was a greater need for non-native speakers to learn the language. And for that reason, it is likely that the Stoics saw little need to write anything remotely close to being comprehensive. It is notable that aspect of the Stoic’s system Porter views as lacking is far less relevant to the native speaker of the language than it is for linguistic researchers. In fact, considering the nature of linguistic categorization, we should expect that the native speakers would not discuss individual usages that he brings up. When native speakers talk about the meaning of grammatical items, they consistently go directly to the most basic, prototypical senses of that grammatical item.[10]

His other two criticisms continue in the same vein: noting negatively again that their conception is “temporally bound” and states that they do not adequately define their terms.[11] The latter statement continues in the same vein as before, with unnecessary expectations being placed on the Stoics. He writes, “The Stoics evidence terminological difficulty in defining the other tense forms, as seen in the repetition of terms within their conceptual framework, sometimes according to temporal reference, sometimes according to kind of action.”[12] It is not clear whether Porter just honestly does not recognize that the Stoics view both tense and aspect as relevant to the verb and that the two categories are closely integrated in their system or whether his hypothesis of Greek as tenseless has predetermined his view of the Stoics.[13]

The former criticism regarding the system being “temporally bound” marks the beginning of an ongoing mistake, in my view, that Porter makes: that tense is temporal and aspect is non-temporal.[14] Perhaps one of the most profound disconnects in Porter’s literature review is that Greek grammarians who talk about temporality and the verb are constantly condemned, but no comment is ever given when linguists discuss the temporality of aspect.[15]

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[1] See, for example: Roy Harris and Talbot Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure (London: Routledge, 1997), 48-53; Vincenzo Di Benedetto, “Dionysius Thrax and the Tékhnē Grammatikḗ” in History of the Language Sciences, Volume 1 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), 394-400; David Blank, “The Organization of Grammar in Ancient Greek” in History of the Language Sciences, Volume 1 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), 400-417. Also relevant is P. H. Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” in History of Linguistics, ed. Guilio Lepschy, English ed., 4 vols (New York: Longman, 1994), 2:67, 1-133.

[2] Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 7.

[3] Ibid., 6.

[4] Adapted from R. H. Robins, The Byzantine Grammarians: Their Place in History (Berlin: Mouton de Gruypter, 1993), 27. Robins does not include the Future and Aorist in his chart, but his broader discussion shows where they fit in relation to the others. Matthews (“Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 46) is in perfect agreement with Robins, but he only provides a prose description for the Stoics rather than a chart.

[5] See Porter, Verbal Aspect, 20-21; Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 46.

[6] Carlota Smith The Parameter of Aspect (2^nd ed.; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997), 66.

[7] The relationship is also likely related to the fact that both have stems terminating in a sigma before their respective person/number endings. This interpretation of the Stoic’s perspective is rather clear. However, whether it is the correct perspective is a completely other issue. Most scholarship views the sigmatic future as historically and semantically distinct from the sigmatic aorist.

[8] Porter, Verbal Aspect, 21.

[9] Porter, Verbal Aspect, 21.

[10] Consider for example, how English speakers conceive of the meaning of prepositions. When we talk about the meaning of “in,” we only think of its basic prototypical use: “Of place or position in space or anything having material extension: Within the limits or bounds of, within (any place or thing).” (OED, loc. cit.). And yet the vast majority of instances of “in” in this very paper are far more abstract than that definition. An instance from footnote 13 above: “ [Robin’s] broader discussion shows where they fit in relation to the others.” The fact that all use of language involves a prototypical exemplar of usage and a variety of (polysemic) extensions that more or less align themselves to that usage is a fundamental fact about the nature of language. For a brief summary of prototypicality and polysemy as related to Greek, see Michael Aubrey, “Middle Voice from the Audience: A Linguist’s Reflections on the SBL Deponency Panel Discussion” (forthcoming). John Taylor (Linguistic Categorization [3^rd ed.; OTL; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 1-18, 41ff.) provides an excellent survey of the research on prototypicality, linguistics, and human cognition.

[11] Porter, Verbal Aspect, 20-21.

[12] Ibid., 20.

[13] But also, it is quite strange that he uses the phrase “kind of action” rather than tense in referring to the complete vs. incomplete distinction. It almost feels as if in choosing these words, he is stacking the deck in his favor right from the start against the neogrammarian Aktionsart—a point to be discussed at length in later sections of this survey.

[14] Porter seems to have worked hard on finding a definition of aspect to avoid time: “a morphologically-based semantic category which grammaticalizes the author/speaker’s reasoned subjective choice of conception of a process” (Ibid., 1). One wonders what a non-temporal process is. Carlota Smith’s statement marks a striking contrast: “Aspectual meaning contributes temporal information and point of view to sentences” (Parameter of Aspect, 1).

[15] For example, Bernard Comrie defines aspect as, “[A]spects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Aspect [CTL; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 3), a definition that Porter refers to (Verbal Aspect, 45) without a single negative word on this fact.

Logeion at the University of Chicago

Helma Dik just made an announcement on her website about a online interface for using digitized Greek lexicons from Perseus. She writes:

This summer, we launched Logeion, an integrated interface for looking up entries in the dictionaries and reference works from the Perseus collection. Logeion is inspired by DVLF, the Dictionnaire vivant de la langue française, but re-designed from the ground up by two Chicago Classics undergraduates, Josh Goldenberg (class of 2012) and Matt Shanahan (class of 2014). Some more details: Logeion does not allow full text search – for this you should still use the separate search pages for the dictionaries, or the homesites of the DuCange and Latin-Dutch dictionaries (see Logeion’s About page).

I’ve been playing with it and its extremely easy to use, providing all the available Perseus lexical entries as well as a list of example sentences pulled directly from the Perseus corpus:

Logeion at the University of Chicago

There’s more useful information the “About Page.”

If you use Chrome, be sure to read through her whole post because there’s a pretty neat feature for integrating Logeion directly into the browser. I’m sure it would be possible to write a Firefox plugin that does the say…though that’s beyond my technical abilities.

(This is cross-posted at B-Greek)

Linguistic Historiography Updated

If you already follow my blog, you’ve probably already seen it, but just in case…

I’ve added a new entry to my page on the historiography of research on the Greek verb, this time on William Trollope’s New Testament grammar. While Trollope isn’t often cited. He is historically sigificant as the first grammar written in English rather than merely translated, though even then he still views his work as a supplement to the Classical grammar of Philipp Butmann, which I have already surveyed. So he still isn’t the full first Koine grammar in English. That status is held by A. T. Robertson’s big grammar, which I’ll get to in due time.

Occasional Surveys in the History of Greek Grammar: William Trollope (1842)

Trollope wrote his grammar with the goal of it functioning as a supplement to Buttmann, specifically focusing on the New Testament and the broader Hellenistic period.[1] The work is brief—just over 250 pages—but it provides a larger discussion of the tenses than Buttmann’s grammar did for Classical Greek.

Like Winer (and contrary to Winer’s first translators) Trollope views the usage of the tenses in the New Testament as “adher[ing] to the ordinary Greek usage.”[2] And with the trend, we have seen with Winer and Buttmann, Trollope expresses an awareness of both tense and aspect as a collection of complex semantic values. The aorist is the indefinite verbal form used in narrative, the imperfect is a past imperfective, “continuing during a past time, when or while something else took place,” the perfect refers to an event in that past whose consequences continue in the present, the pluperfect functions in the same manner with reference to a previous past time reference, and the future marks a future action. [3] Trollope also follows Buttmann in that he does not actually discuss the present tense, except in reference to how it is used for (or replaced by) other tenses.

Once again, more illuminating are the descriptions of how tenses are used for other tenses. Like Winer, they continue to be motivated and do not simply involve arbitrary interchangeability and more about specific syntactic and pragmatic situations. For example, Trollope observes that the imperfect can, at times, appears in the place of the aorist, but specifically in the context of spoken discourse when a narrative is relayed by an eyewitness.[4] At least, that is the explanation he came up with for the phenomenon. And technically, the explanation fits much of the data.  However, later grammatical work has proposed at least one alternative explanation. Robertson suggests that verbs of speaking and commanding take the imperfect when the action is conceptualized as being unaccomplished until the command is completed, the question answered, and so forth.[5] In either case, the question is significant because of its relationship to current debates on the nature of the historical present, which also is extremely common with verbs of speech. The question is whether the historical present involves a mismatch of both tense and aspect or only a mismatch of tense.

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[1] William Trollope, A Greek Grammar to the New Testament and to the Common or Hellenic Diction of the Later Greek Writers (London: Whittaker & Co., 1942). As far as my own research goes, Trollope’s grammar is the first reference work on New Testament Greek to be written in English rather than merely translated. Despite this fact—one than makes Trollope an important work historically­—there appears to be little to no awareness of his work in later scholarship. In his preface, Trollope does not seem aware of the fact that Winer’s grammar had been already translated into English.

[2] Ibid., 129.

[3] Ibid., 129-30. Notably, Trollope provides a more extensive discussion of imperfect functions than any of the grammars we have seen thus far, including: the basic functions of the imperfect: progressive, iterative/habitual, and inchoative.

[4] Ibid., 132.

[5] Robertson, Grammar of the Greek New Testament, 882-3.

Stanley Porter is Blogging

I’m quite pleased to see this. Hopefully, we’ll see some good Greek blogging coming from him. I’ve always been extremely curious about how his views about developed over the past two decades. Beyond the tense-aspect debate, I have greatly appreciated his work–particularly in his recent introductory grammar. Depending on what he does with his blog, this has the potential to open up new level of dialogue on Greek grammar.

http://stanleyeporter.wordpress.com/

It’s nice to see that he’s on WordPress, too.

HT: Nijay Gupta & Michael Bird

Some Initial Musings on the Workshop at the Lorentz Center

There were a number of major themes that were regularly touched on, including the issue of open source (or at least open access) for data sets and materials for linguistic, text critical, and other forms of analysis, the question of how to integrate the computer technology in the biblical studies classroom, and then the future of linguistic databases (e.g. Hebrew & Greek syntax treebanks).

1. The open source/open access issue is an interesting one, simply because of the fact that someone needs to pay something for major Greek and Hebrew linguistic projects to move forward. I’m not still not sure how these kinds of large projects can work without funding and most of time that funding is going to come with limitations on the openness of the data. Likewise, those who work on projects on the side without funding (e.g. my own computational Greek project) tend to be less inclined to simply sharing their work because they know all of the effort that went into it. On top of that, there is the simple fact that there are very, very few people that I would trust with my data projects–and most of those people were in attendance at the workshop. My data is my baby. How do I know it will be safe out in the wild? I’m not against sharing it, but it would definitely have to be with the right people for the time being. I don’t know. Perhaps my reluctance has more to do with the (relatively) nascent state of much of my data, which when combined with the fact that I can count on my hands and feet the number of Greek scholars who do the work I do, makes me slightly uncomfortable.
2. I can’t say much about the teaching question. I have tutored biblical languages individually, but the only teaching I’ve done has been in linguistic classes and the software question is not really an issue. With that said, I would be curious about how others have or have not integrated software and computers into their teaching of Greek and Hebrew. Any comments from the audience?
3. One of the major thrusts of the third theme centered around how such databases will connect with other sub-fields of biblical studies. And on that front, I’m quite excited to see what happens. I’m not a biblical scholar; I’m a linguist, but there were several exciting projects on the horizon that should be very good should they come into fruition, particularly in conjunction with textual critics (perhaps more on that later). As related to point #1, I would be interested in data sharing on that front.

There is more to come. I’ll be writing up some musing on specific sessions and topics in the coming week or so, but there are a few beginning thoughts.

Translating Metaphor: He just snapped for no reason!

I was reading 4 Maccabees in Greek this evening and was reminded of this audio clip from Brian Regan:

It’s the fascinating metaphorical extensions of the word: οἶστρος.

Here’s the entry from LSJ (with integrated supplement):

οἶστρος, ὁ, gadfly, breese, prob. Tabanus bovinus, an insect which infests cattle, τὰς μέν τʼ αἰόλος οἶ. ἐφορμηθεὶς ἐδόνησεν, ὥρῃ ἐν εἰαρινῇ Od.22.300; of the fly that tormented Io, A.Supp.541 (lyr.), Pr.567 sq. (lyr.) (also called μύωψ, ib. 675, Supp.308: but the two are distd. by Arist.HA490^a20, 596^b14).

2. an insect that infests tunny-fish, prob. Brachiella thynni, ib. 557^a27, 602^a28.

3. a small insectivorous bird, perh. Sylvia trochilus, ib. 592^b22.

II. metaph., a sting, anything that drives mad, κεραυνοῦ οἶ. E.HF862; οἴστροις Ἐρινύων Id.IT1456: abs., the smart of pain, agony, S.Tr.1254.

2. any vehement desire, insane passion, Simon.36.10 P., Hdt.2.93, E.Hipp.1300, Pl.R.577e, etc.; ὄρεξις μετὰ οἴστρου καὶ ἀδημονίας Epicur.Fr.483: c. gen. objecti, κτεάνων for wealth, AP11.389 (Lucill.): generally, madness, frenzy, S.Ant.1002, E.Or.791: pl., Id.Ba.665; μανιάδες οἶ. Id.IA548 (lyr.).

3. in good sense, zeal, οἶ. εἰς πᾶν ἀγαθὸν ἔργον PMasp.3.13 (vi a.d.).

And the text from the 4 Maccabees 2.2-3:

² ταύτῃ γοῦν ὁ σώφρων Ιωσηφ ἐπαινεῖται, ὅτι διανοίᾳ περιεκράτησεν τῆς ἡδυπαθείας. ³νέος γὰρ ὢν καὶ ἀκμάζων πρὸς συνουσιασμὸν ἠκύρωσε τῷ λογισμῷ τὸν τῶν παθῶν οἶστρον.

The semantic development here is pretty great:

Physical entity of the external world: gadfly.

Metaphoric Extension (my supposition): the sight of cattle freaking out while being bit by gadflies.

Semantic Bleaching: Any sort of sharp pain or sting.

Semantic Bleaching: An apparently inexplicable pain (i.e. the gadfly isn’t seen) giving the appearance of madness.

Metaphoric Extension: An inexplicable passion giving the appearance of madness.

Semantic Bleaching: inexplicable passion extended to both positive (zeal) and negative.

Specific Instantiation in 4 Macc 2:3: Sexual desire is irrational emotion.

This sort of metaphorical phenomenon is the grounding of all language use, too. Our ability to categorize and metaphorize our experience is what grounds language in the world. But translation as it is currently done, doesn’t account for this very well (whether we’re talking about “literal” or “functional” translation). Consider the NRSV’s translation here:

vs 2-3 It is for this reason, certainly, that the temperate Joseph is praised, because by mental effort he overcame sexual desire. For when he was young and in his prime for intercourse, by his reason he nullified the frenzy of the passions.

Aside from the incredibly awkward phrasing and the generally terrible way that most translations deal with translating texts involving sex (it always feels like they’re blushing when I read them), the bigger point is that all of the semantic entailments of the metaphor are lost here. The problem is how to regain them–if that’s even possible in English. In terms of the theoretical questions, we’re getting there slowly. We haven’t yet gotten there in terms of practice. Linguists have been working on these issues of meaning for a few decades now and they’re starting to get through (I hope). It’s what Rich Rhodes was talking about when he spoke of a 4G translation.

On my way to Leiden…

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a workshop at the Lorentz Center at the University of Leiden focusing linguistic databases for biblical texts and languages:

Biblical Scholarship and Humanities Computing: Data Types, Text, Language and Interpretation

I’m hoping that I’ll have an opportunity to blog about it as we go, but I don’t know what things will look like until I get there. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to meeting a number of people whom I’ve only dialogued online (whether e-mail, this blog, or B-Greek).

From the description:

[T]he question to be discussed by biblical scholars and ICT specialists is: how to deal with a historically grown and changed set of literary and linguistic data? How can we analyse, store and retrieve linguistic data at the level of syntax and discourse, especially when we know that texts have been reworked and updated during the long period of their transmission?

The research question is: can one go beyond databases that just add learned annotations to linguistic knowledge? Some examples. When using the existing data base for research of ‘verbal valence patterns’ one will find patterns and functions not being present in classical lexica.

The organizing team, a collaboration by specialists in Greek texts, Hebrew texts and in data bases designed for research in the Humanities, will prepare this colloquium by debates and experiments on (1) linguistic system versus unique literary artefacts and (2) the challenges of historical change: texts, variants and ancient translations. So our aim is to start the colloquium with a presentation of some models to be discussed based on input from the various disciplines involved. After presentations of type (1) and (2) a computer specialist will react, ask questions and make proposals (3).

Filología Neotestamentaria

Many of you are likely familiar with the journal Filología Neotestamentaria simply because it’s the only journal of its kind that deals with a broad coverage of Greek language issues focusing on the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods of the language. And I’m sure that most of you have greatly appreciated the fact that the majority of issues are available online at their website (in the linked title above).

At the same time, I’m sure you’ve also been regularly frustrated by the fact that only issues starting on 1994 are available in digital format and the first issues from 1988-1993 are completely inaccessible unless you have a good reliable university library readily at hand.

I, in particular, have been meaning pick up Stephen Levinsohn and Jenny Heimerdinger article, “The Use of the Definitive Article before Names of People in the Greek Text of Acts with Particular Reference to Codex Bezae” through interlibrary loan. I’ve read it, but having a copy via ILL would be far more useful (note to self). It is an article that—in my view—has set the standard for how we understand the use of the Greek article with proper names, which has only just come up in beginner’s forum over at B-Greek. A read through that article would clear things up nicely. There are a couple books that deal with the subject too: Levinsohn’s Discourse Features of New Testament Greek and Stephanie Bakker’s The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek. Obviously the former is far more affordable for the average person while also covering far more ground than just the use of the article and the function of the noun phrase, but they’re both excellent books (my review of Bakker is here: Noun Phrase Review Part I and Noun Phrase Review Part II). In the mean time, I’m hoping that I can tease out the function of the article with proper names in a more didactic fashion.

Anyway, there is a more accessible venue for Filología Neotestamentaria coming with Logos Bible Software: Filología Neotestamentaria (31 vols.). I’d say that’s definitely worth the money ($99 = $3.20 per issue), particularly for those issues that aren’t available digitally and when you don’t have access to the internet.

New Page on Historiographical Issues in Ancient Greek Grammar

I’ve added a new page tonight that houses my ongoing series of posts on how the Greek tense-aspect system has been described over the centuries: Linguistic Historiography with a brief introduction. I hope it will be a useful presentation and analysis of many old grammars that most people (even most people who are interested in studying Greek) are quite likely to never read. The historical questions surrounding how the tenseless view of the language appeared are quite interesting to me and I plan on writing on and examining roughly 30+ grammars on the subject. Currently, there are about 22 listed, including Thrax and the Stoics, but that will grow. And for those of you who worry that this project will fall by the way side and disappear, don’t worry. I’ve already written 34 pages of discussion of nine separate grammarians from the 19th century.

Some grammarians not on the list that I plan on adding:

• Smyth
• Kruger
• Mussies
• Gignac
• Mandilaras
• Rijksbaron
• …

Right now, its mostly limited to grammars that I actually own or have easy access to. If anyone would like to suggest grammars that I should write about, I would definitely welcome it–and if anyone would like to provide me with a copy of the grammar in question, then even more so! More than anything, I’d like this to become a helpful resource.