Traditional Grammar: The Greeks, The Romans, and The Arabs

1.      Classical period: Traditional Grammar

Traditional Grammarians were people who studied their language in ancient times. They were the Greeks,
Indians, Romans and Arabs. This approach is called traditional because it was transmitted from an early
past. In fact, Traditional Grammar was the precursor or the root of what is now known as Linguistics.
In this Lecture, we shall throw a light on some specific traditional linguistic/thought schools: the Greeks, the
Greek-Alexandrian, and the Roman.
A.    The Greeks ( 5th C BC)
The Ancient Greeks were the pioneers in field of investigation of language; they studied Greek exclusively
and show little interest – or none – to the other existing languages at that period. The most prominent Greek
philosophers who studied it were Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. Each of them developed interesting ideas
about language; however, they speculated about them.
One famous example of their speculation concerned the nature and origin of language. The question debated
was “Is language due to physis [nature] or to Namos [naming]?” In other terms, is language governed by
nature, which is physis, as any other natural phenomenon like the falling of rain, or is it the result of a social
convention (agreement) that is Nomes.
Those who supported the first point of view were called the Naturalists whereas the other group was called
the Conventionalists.
Plato: among the Naturalists, there was the famous philosopher Plato. Cratylus (Ancient Greek: Kratulos) is
the name of a dialogue Plato wrote. In the dialogue, Socrates is asked by two men, Cratylus and
Hermogenes, to tell them whether names are « conventional » or « natural », that is, whether language is a
system of arbitrary signs or whether words have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify. The discussed
question was whether the relationship existing between a thing and its name natural or not. Their answer was
obviously yes as they thought it was due to physis and the logical deduction was that it’s not invented by the
humankind. For instance, the name “table” was naturally given to the thing (that four-legged, flat-topped
piece of furniture used to eat on) and was not invented “out of the blue”.
WHY? Their explanation was that their language, and especially vocabulary, contained a load of
onomatopoeic words (sound-like words like “meowing”, “boom” or “splash”) They put forward that this
sound-symbolism plays an important role in the NAMING of many things. In short, the Naturalists claim
that the existence of such onomatopoeic words proves their theory and that language is not the fruit of
invention. However, the Conventionalists disagreed with them for two main reasons:

    Onomatopoeic words varie from a language to another like “knock-knock” in English and its
French equivalent “toc-toc” which shows that each speech community invented its own
onomatopoeic words.
     The majority of words in a given language are obviously not onomatopoeic!

Epicure:  (340 – 270) he held an intermediate position: half naturalist and half conventionalist at the same
time. He states that the name of the things comes naturally to the human being who modifies it by
convention afterwards (that is the speech communities adapt the natural sound according to the phonology
or rather “ the music” of  their language ).
Aristotle: (384 – 322 BC) He clearly claimed that language cannot be BUT conventional simply because the
relation between the thing/name is arbitrary.
The stoics: (a Naturalist school) it appeared in Athens after Aristotle. Unlike the other philosophers, the
Stoics introduced new ways of language study, for they discussed specific aspect of language like grammar,
etymology ( i.e origin of words), and phonetics. However, the debate “Naturalist” VS. “Conventionalist”
lasted during many centuries.
But by the second century before Christ, another question was debated: is language regular or irregular?

 Regular means that it focuses on rules; in other words, it is analogical. Analogists explained that
language is regular and organized. This regularity helps people to acquire it by overgeneralization.
An example of the analogist reasoning (reflection) rules is: car + s form the plural form cars and the
same thing is with boys, chairs…
   Irregular, in the other hand, focuses on exceptions, that is, anomalist. According to the Anomalists,
language is irregular because rules are not always respected (James, news, phenomena …these word
do not systematically canote the plural form)

B.    The Greek-Alexandrian (~3rd C BC)

The Greek had a colony in Alexandria- Egypt. They were influenced by them ,and therefore, developed their
literary and linguistic investigation. They studied Greek and the art of writing (Grammatikos).
What discoveries have the Greek made about grammar?
Plato founded the verb and the noun and defined them.
Aristotle founded the class of conjunctions.
The stoics founded transitive and intransitive verbs.
Greeks also discovered the adverb (ad-verbum), participles, pronouns and prepositions.
Adjectives were first classified with verbs then with nouns, finally in the medieval times; they had their own
word class along with the gender case, number, tense…

C.    Romans ( Roman Empire)

During the second and the third C BC, Greece fell under the control of Rome. In that period, Latin
grammarians discovered the Greek grammar, they applied the Greek grammatical models to their own
language. The two languages having similarities, they used the same parts of speech (V, N, Adj, Adv, Prep,
conj, articles, pronoun). Clearly, the presentation of Latin grammar was similar to the Greek one.

 2.       The Arabs (from Middle Ages onwards )

     The study of Sarf (i.e. morphology) begins, so far as records go, with Sibawaihi of Basra’s Al Kitaab. It’s
a descriptive study of classical Arabic and the analysis of the inflected nouns and verbs as well as the
description of the sounds of Arabic.

      For classical Arabic grammarians, the grammatical sciences are divided into five branches:

 al-luġah ‫( اللغة‬language/lexicon) concerned with collecting and explaining vocabulary

 at-taṣrīf ‫( التصريف‬morphology) determining the form of the individual words
 an-naḥw ‫( النحو‬syntax) primarily concerned with inflection (ʾiʿrāb) which had already been lost in
dialects.
 al-ištiqāq ‫( االشتقاق‬derivation) examining the origin of the words
 al-balāġah ‫( البالغة‬rhetoric) which elucidates constructquality