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Priscian

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Priscian, or the Grammar, relief from the bell tower of Florence by Luca della Robbia
Priscian, or the Grammar, relief from the bell tower of Florence by Luca della Robbia

Priscianus Caesariensis (fl. AD 500), commonly known as Priscian (/ˈprɪʃən/ or /ˈprɪʃiən/), was a Latin grammarian and the author of the Institutes of Grammar, which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.

Life

The details of Priscian's life are largely unknown. Priscian was born and raised in the North-African city of Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria), the capital of the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis, which during his lifetime would be under the control of the Vandalic Kingdom. He was probably of Greek descent.[1] According to Cassiodorus, he taught Latin at Constantinople[2] in the early sixth century.[3] His minor works include a panegyric to Anastasius (491—518), written about 512,[4] which helps establish his time period. In addition, the manuscripts of his Institutes contain a subscription to the effect that the work was copied (526, 527) by Flavius Theodorus, a clerk in the imperial secretariat.[5]

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Caesarea in Mauretania

Caesarea in Mauretania

Caesarea in Mauretania was a Roman colony in Roman-Berber North Africa. It was the capital of Mauretania Caesariensis and is now called Cherchell, in modern Algeria. In the present time Caesarea is used as a titular see for Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bishops.

Cherchell

Cherchell

Cherchell is a town on Algeria's Mediterranean coast, 89 kilometers (55 mi) west of Algiers. It is the seat of Cherchell District in Tipaza Province. Under the names Iol and Caesarea, it was formerly a Roman colony and the capital of the kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania.

Mauretania Caesariensis

Mauretania Caesariensis

Mauretania Caesariensis was a Roman province located in what is now Algeria in the Maghreb. The full name refers to its capital Caesarea Mauretaniae.

Cassiodorus

Cassiodorus

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, commonly known as Cassiodorus, was a Christian, Roman statesman, renowned scholar of antiquity, and writer serving in the administration of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. Senator was part of his surname; not his rank. He also founded a monastery, Vivarium, where he worked extensively the last three decades of his life.

Constantinople

Constantinople

Constantinople became the de facto capital of the Roman Empire upon its founding in 330, and became the de jure capital in AD 476 after the fall of Ravenna and the Western Roman Empire. It remained the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Latin Empire (1204–1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922). Following the Turkish War of Independence, the Turkish capital then moved to Ankara. Officially renamed Istanbul in 1930, the city is today the largest city and financial centre of the Republic of Turkey (1923–present). It is also the largest city in Europe.

Panegyric

Panegyric

A panegyric is a formal public speech or written verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing. The original panegyrics were speeches delivered at public events in ancient Athens.

Works

Institutiones Grammaticae, 1290 circa, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence
Institutiones Grammaticae, 1290 circa, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

Priscian's most famous work, the Institutes of Grammar (Latin: Institutiones Grammaticae), is a systematic exposition of Latin grammar. The dedication to Julian probably indicates the consul and patrician, not the author of a well-known epitome of Justinian's Novellae, who lived somewhat later than Priscian. The grammar is divided into eighteen books, of which the first sixteen deal mainly with sounds, word-formation and inflexions; the last two, which form from a fourth to a third of the whole work, deal with syntax.[5]

Priscian's grammar is based on the earlier works of Herodian and Apollonius. The examples it includes to illustrate the rules preserve numerous fragments from Latin authors which would otherwise have been lost, including Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius, Cato and Varro. But the authors whom he quotes most frequently are Virgil, and, next to him, Terence, Cicero, Plautus; then Lucan, Horace, Juvenal, Sallust, Statius, Ovid, Livy and Persius.[5]

The grammar was quoted by several writers in Britain of the 8th century - Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin - and was abridged or largely used in the next century by Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda and Servatus Lupus of Ferrières. About a thousand manuscripts exist, all ultimately derived from the copy made by Theodorus. Most copies contain only books I—XVI; these are sometimes known as the Priscianus Major ("Greater Priscian"). Others contain only books XVII and XVIII along with the three books to Symmachus; these are known as his work On Construction (De Constructione) or the Priscianus Minor ("Lesser Priscian"). A few copies contain both parts. The earliest manuscripts are from the 9th century, though a few fragments are somewhat earlier.[5]

Priscian's minor works include:[5]

  • Three treatises dedicated to Symmachus (the father-in-law of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius): on weights and measures; on the metres of Terence; and the Praeexercitamina, a translation into Latin of Greek rhetorical exercises from Hermogenes.
  • De nomine, pronomine, et verbo ("On noun, pronoun, and verb"), an abridgment of part of his Institutes for teaching grammar in schools
  • Partitiones xii. versuum Aeneidos principalium: another teaching aid, using question and answer to dissect the first lines of each of the twelve books of the Aeneid. The metre is discussed first, each verse is scanned, and each word thoroughly and instructively examined.
  • The poem on Anastasius mentioned above, in 312 hexameters with a short iambic introduction
  • A translation in 1087 hexameters of the verse-form geographical survey by Dionysius Periegetes.

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Justinian I

Justinian I

Justinian I, also known as Justinian the Great, was the Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565.

Aelius Herodianus

Aelius Herodianus

Aelius Herodianus or Herodian was one of the most celebrated grammarians of Greco-Roman antiquity. He is usually known as Herodian except when there is a danger of confusion with the historian also named Herodian.

Apollonius Dyscolus

Apollonius Dyscolus

Apollonius Dyscolus is considered one of the greatest of the Greek grammarians.

Ennius

Ennius

Quintus Ennius was a writer and poet who lived during the Roman Republic. He is often considered the father of Roman poetry. He was born in the small town of Rudiae, located near modern Lecce, Apulia,, a town founded by the Messapians, and could speak Greek as well as Latin and Oscan. Although only fragments of his works survive, his influence in Latin literature was significant, particularly in his use of Greek literary models.

Pacuvius

Pacuvius

Marcus Pacuvius was an ancient Roman tragic poet. He is regarded as the greatest of their tragedians prior to Lucius Accius.

Lucius Accius

Lucius Accius

Lucius Accius, or Lucius Attius, was a Roman tragic poet and literary scholar. Accius was born in 170 BC at Pisaurum, a town founded in the Ager Gallicus in 184 BC. He was the son of a freedman and a freedwoman, probably from Rome.

Cato the Elder

Cato the Elder

Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Censor, the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write history in Latin with his Origines, a now fragmentary work on the history of Rome. His work De agri cultura, a rambling work on agriculture, farming, rituals, and recipes, is the oldest extant prose written in the Latin language. His epithet "Elder" distinguishes him from his great-grandson Cato the Younger, who opposed Julius Caesar.

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome". He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.

Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics. He is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC.

Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus, commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.

Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."

Sallust

Sallust

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust, was a Roman historian and politician from an Italian plebeian family. Probably born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines, Sallust became a partisan of Julius Caesar, circa 50s BC. He is the earliest known Latin-language Roman historian with surviving works to his name, of which Conspiracy of Catiline, The Jugurthine War, and the Histories remain extant. As a writer, Sallust was primarily influenced by the works of the 5th-century BC Greek historian Thucydides. During his political career he amassed great and ill-gotten wealth from his governorship of Africa.

Legacy

Books XVII & XVIII of the Institutes, his work On Construction, was part of the core curriculum of the University of Paris in the 13th century and Roger Bacon's lectures for the class were the probable origin of his own Overview of Grammar, one of the first expositions on the idea of a universal grammar. Dante places Priscian in Hell among sodomites in Canto XV of his Inferno.[6]

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University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris, known metonymically as the Sorbonne, was the leading university in Paris, France, active from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 under the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated with the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris, it was considered the second-oldest university in Europe.

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.

Universal grammar

Universal grammar

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare. It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.

Inferno (Dante)

Inferno (Dante)

Inferno is the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. The Inferno describes Dante's journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the "realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen". As an allegory, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul toward God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin.

Editions and translations

Editions

  • Prisciani caesariensis grammatici opera ... Edited by Augvst Krehl. Lipsiae: Weidmann, 1819–20.
  • Prisciani institutionum grammaticalium librorum I-XVI, indices et concordantiae. Curantibus Cirilo Garcia Roman, Marco A. Gutierrez Galindo. Hildesheim, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 2001, ISBN 9783487113081
  • Prisciani institutionum grammaticalium librorum XVII et XVIII, indices et concordantiae. Curantibus Cirilo Garcia Roman, Marco A. Gutierrez Galindo, Maria del Carmen Diaz de Alda Carlos. Hildesheim, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1999.
  • Prisciani Caesariensis opuscula. Critical edition edited by Marina Passalacqua with commentary in Italian. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1987 (vol. I: De figuris numerorum. De metris Terentii. Praeexercitamina; vol. II: Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo partitiones duodecim versuum aeneidos principalium)

German Translations

  • Schönberger, A. 2009. Priscians Darstellung der lateinischen Pronomina: lateinischer Text und kommentierte deutsche Übersetzung des 12. und 13. Buches der Institutiones Grammaticae, Frankfurt am Main: Valentia. ISBN 978-3-936132-34-2 (books XII-XIII; first translation into a modern language.)
  • Schönberger, A. 2008. Priscians Darstellung der lateinischen Präpositionen: lateinischer Text und kommentierte deutsche Übersetzung des 14. Buches der Institutiones Grammaticae, Frankfurt am Main: Valentia, 2008, ISBN 978-3-936132-18-2 (book XIV; first translation into a modern language.)
  • Schönberger, A. 2010. Priscians Darstellung der lateinischen Konjunktionen: lateinischer Text und kommentierte deutsche Übersetzung des 16. Buches der Institutiones Grammaticae, Frankfurt am Main: Valentia. ISBN 978-3-936132-09-0 (of book XVI; first translation into a modern language.)
  • Schönberger, A. 2010. Priscians Darstellung der lateinischen Syntax (I): lateinischer Text und kommentierte deutsche Übersetzung des 17. Buches der Institutiones Grammaticae, Frankfurt am Main: Valentia. ISBN 978-3-936132-10-6 (book XVII = first book of the "Priscianus minor"; first translation into a modern language.)
  • Schönberger, A. 2010. Priscians Darstellung des silbisch gebundenen Tonhöhenmorenakzents des Lateinischen: lateinischer Text und kommentierte deutsche Übersetzung des Buches über den lateinischen Akzent, Frankfurt am Main: Valentia. ISBN 978-3-936132-11-3 (De accentibus; first translation into a modern language).
  • Schönberger, A. 2014: Zur Lautlehre, Prosodie und Phonotaktik des Lateinischen gemäß der Beschreibung Priscians. In: Millennium. Vol. 11, pp. 121–184.

French translations

  • Priscien, Grammaire. Livre XIV - XV - XVI, Paris: Vrin 2013.
  • Priscien, Grammaire. Livre XVII – Syntaxe I, Paris: Vrin 2010.

Source: "Priscian", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 14th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscian.

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Notes
  1. ^ Wilkes, J. (2012). "Aelius Donatus (Fourth Century CE) and Priscian (Sixth Century CE)". In Thomas, Margaret (ed.). Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics. Routledge. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-136-70750-6.
  2. ^ Keil, Gr. Lat. vii. 207
  3. ^ Jones 1964, p. 991.
  4. ^ Lejay 1911.
  5. ^ a b c d e Chisholm 1911, p. 360.
  6. ^ Dante, Inf., Canto XV, l. 109.
References

Attribution

Further reading
  • M. Baratin, B. Colombat, L. Holtz, (eds). 2009. Priscien. Transmission et refondation de la grammaire, de l'antiquité aux modernes, Brepols Publishers. ISBN 978-2-503-53074-1.
  • Luhtala, Anneli. 2005. Grammar and Philosophy in Late Antiquity. A Study of Priscian's Sources. John Benjamins. Series: Studies in the history of the language sciences; 107. Preview available at Google Books as of February 2011.
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