GRAMMAR

1. ORIGIN OF GRAMMAR
and
The contribution of Greeks in its development
Mohd. Faraz Zubairi
17ETM13 MA English (I)

2. Origin of Grammar
• Originated from ‘gramma’ meaning letter.
• Comes from ‘graphein’ meaning to draw or to write.
• Adjective - ‘grammatike’ from which Latin ‘grammaticus’ is
derived.

3. Grammar in Ancient Greece
• Pioneers in field of investigation of language.
• Principles of grammar were first formulated by the scholars
of Ancient Greece and Rome.
• Studied Greek exclusively and showed little interest to the
other existing languages at that period.

4. Grammar in Ancient Greece
• Mainly used for the analysis of the literature, or for
deciphering the rules of ancient languages of the holy
books.
• Initially studied as a part of philosophy, logic and rhetoric.
• Developed through the works of scholars like Plato,
Aristotle, the Stoics and the Alexandrians.

5. Plato
• Study of grammar began with Plato’s dialogue Cratylus in
5th century B.C.
• Language thoughts must be cohesive and combined by the
logical rules.
• Devised word classification system into two groups –
o Onoma – Performer of an action
o Rhema – The action

6. Aristotle
• Complemented Plato’s efforts by adding word classes that
weren’t part of his broad classification.
• Made the first substantial effort to devise a system of parts
of speech.
• Added conjunctions.
• Defined structural word features such as tense.

7. Stoics
• Introduced and studied phonetics, grammar and etymology
as separate levels of study.
• Divided Aristotle’s ‘onoma’ into proper noun and common
noun.
• Chrysippus, a Stoic scholar, added ‘articles’ to word
classes.

8. Dionysius Thrax
• Member of the Alexandrian school of thought.
• ‘Techne Grammatike’ analyses literary texts in terms of
letters, syllables and eight parts of speech.
o Noun (onoma)
o Verb (rhema)
o Participle (metoche)
o Article (arthron)
o Pronouns (antxnymia)
o Prepositions (prythesis)
o Adverbs (epirrhema))
o Conjunctions (syndesmos)

9. Apollonius Dyscolus
• Wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax,
semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology
etc.
• Four of which are still well preserved –
o Syntax in four books
o three one-book monographs on Pronouns, Adverbs,
and Connectives, respectively.
• Based his syntactic descriptions on the relations of the
noun and the verb to each other and the remaining word
classes to these two.

10. EFCHARISTÓ