Classical and medieval linguistics

Greek linguistic scholars were profoundly to influence their Latin successors, whose thinking, as we saw, exerts a profound influence on prescriptive English grammar even today. The achievement that was to have the greatest impact on Europe and the wider world, however, was the development of a phonemic writing system, i.e. one based on the key sound contrasts used by the language. As early as the second millennium bce, a syllabic writing system now known to archaeologists as ‘Linear B’ was used by the Myceneans, and in the first millennium bce the first alphabet in the modern sense of the term was adapted by the Greeks from Phoenician script. The Phoenician ‘alphabet’ had consisted essentially of consonants: vowels, which in Semitic languages are largely predictable from word structure and context, did not generally need to be marked.

The Greeks introduced vowel symbols, sometimes adapting them from Phoenician characters: Phoenician aleph, for example, which indicated a glottal stop, eventually became alpha, representing the /a/ phoneme (the word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters). The alphabetic system was borrowed initially by the Etruscans of central Italy, and subsequently adapted to become the Latin alphabet, which forms the basis for most modern European writing systems.

The ancient origins of text-speak?

Given the consonants of the word root k_t_b, an Arabic speaker can deduce the vowels and their position from context and easily determine whether the word is kitab (book) or one of its cognates, katib (writer) or kataba (he wrote). This works less well in English and other non-Semitic languages: given bldr, for example, it is not immediately clear whether the word is bolder, boulder, builder or even balder, and similar problems beset Greek. But it has often been pointed out that, even in English, sentences in which the vowels have been omitted are still relatively easy to decipher:

Th qck brwn fx jmpd vr th lzy dg

while those in which the consonants have been left out are impenetrable:

e ui o o ue oe e a o

(The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.)

This essential insight informs modern shorthand systems, conference interpreters’ note-taking and, of course, txt msgng!

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, written probably in the eighth century BCE, held a quasi-scriptural status in ancient Greek education, and Homeric scholarship from the sixth century BCE onwards shows acute awareness of how the Greek language had changed in the intervening period. The ‘problem’ of linguistic change is also explored in Plato’s Cratylus, the theme of which is the fit between the essence of an object or concept and its rendering in language. Socrates and the eponymous Cratylus himself argue for linguistic naturalism, i.e. the view that names or words belong naturally to the objects or concepts they identify: in Cratylus’ view these were laid down by the gods themselves, though the connection between a word and its essence may have become opaque as a result of linguistic change.

The counter position – conventionalism – is advanced by Hermogenes, who sees no connection between words and concepts, arguing that they have come about purely as a result of convention. The naturalist perspective of Cratlyus in particular reflects a purely hellenocentric world view. The ancient Greeks were generally uninterested in languages other than their own, speakers of which were dismissed as bárbaroi (from which the English barbarian derives), and the question of why, if words are divinely ordained, languages express similar concepts in so many different ways is simply not raised. But what is interesting about this dialogue is the debate it prefigures about arbitrariness in language, which will be central to Saussure’s thinking in the early twentieth century.

A grammatical description of the Greek language was provided by Aristotle, whose Rhetoric offers a rudimentary categorical description of Greek words into nominal (onoma, Gk) and verbal (rhema, Gk) elements, together with a third class of functional elements he called syndesmoi, and which included conjunctions, articles and pronouns. This was developed by Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BCE) in Alexandria, whose Techne grammatike (‘Art of Grammar’) set out the basis for the ‘parts of speech’ of traditional grammar. His eight word classes included nouns, verbs, participles and articles, but not yet adjectives: at this stage these are seen to form part of the noun class.

Later Roman writers largely adopted Dionysius’s categories and applied them to Latin: Varro’s De Lingua Latina (‘On the Latin language’), composed in the first century bce, introduces the notion of derivational and inflectional formation (or morphology in modern terms); Priscian’s 18-volume Institutiones Grammaticae (‘Foundations of Grammar’), written some six centuries later, presented some minor modifications to Dionysius’ system – omitting for example the word class of articles, which Latin did not possess – and also addressed pronunciation and syllable structure. The continuing importance of Latin as a lingua franca throughout Europe for education and, more importantly, the Christian church ensured that Priscian’s work remained influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Descriptions of other languages (e.g. Welsh, Irish, Provençal), which appear in the early medieval period, are often based on Priscian’s model or are designed to illuminate the study of Latin: Aelfric says of his Latin Grammar, composed around the turn of the eleventh century and believed to be the first grammar of Latin in a vernacular (or low-status) language, that it would serve as a good introduction to English, even though this was not its primary purpose.