ed krentz wrote:Some time ago someone said that the ancient Grammarian Dionysios Thrax was later than the first century B.C. All the sources I have for classical Greek date his grammar to the first century (OCD 3rd ed., Der Kleine Pauly, etc.).
I would appreciate the bibliography that gives the evidence for the later dating, if someone can supply it.
Edgar Krentz
If you're talking about my statement from this thread:
Re: Noun Case Endings & Verb Endings, then you've slightly misread my statement. I definitely do think that Dionysius Thrax did live around the first or second centuries B.C. And he definitely wrote a grammar during that time. The question is how much of it still exists. In the previous thread, Stephen Carlson asked a related question
and I gave a bibliography. Those works are still relevant to this question, so I reproduce it here with a couple more annotations:
Classicists:
Blank, David. “The Organization of Grammar in Ancient Greek.” Pages 400-417 in History of the Language Sciences. Vol 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000.
Swiggers, Peter and Alfons Wouters. “Content and Context in (Translating) Ancient Grammar.” Pages 123-61 in Ancient Grammar: Content and Context. Leuven: Peeters, 1996.
Linguists:
Di Benedetto, Vincenzo. “Dionysius Thrax and the Tékhnē Grammatikḗ.” Pages 394-400 in History of the Language Sciences. Vol 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000.
Harris, Roy and Talbot Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure. London: Routledge, 1997.
Classicist Linguists:
Matthews, P. H. “Greek and Latin Linguistics.” Pages 2-133 in History of Linguistics: Classical and Medieval Linguistics. Ed. Guilio Lepschy. English Ed. 4 vols. New York: Longman, 1994.
Linguist Historians:
Robins, R. H. A Short History of Linguistics. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1997.
______. The Byzantine Grammarians: Their Place in History. Berlin: Mouton de Gruypter, 1993.
But I just remembered that I also have in Kindle another source on the question that's much more accessible than these monographs (some of which are incredibly expensive and relatively difficult to find):
Eleanor Dickey's
Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatise, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period is an excellent little volume that can be had rather cheaply and is quite a unique and useful resource for for the contemporary state of research on Ancient Greek scholarship. Here's the first paragraph from her discussion of Thrax:
Eleanor Dickey (with my emphasis added) wrote:A short, simple grammatical introduction entitled Τέχη γραμματική is traditionally attributed to Dionysius (c.170-c.90 BC), a pupil of Aristarchus. This handbook was enormously influential from late antiquity onward and is certainly one of the most important surviving grammatical works. If the attribution to Dionysius can be trusted, the handbook is also the only Hellenistic grammatical treatise to survive to modern times. Dionysius' authorship, however, has been doubted since antiquity and has recently been the focus of considerable discussion; some scholars maintain that the entire treatise is a compilation of the third or fourth century AD, while others defend its complete authenticity and date it to the end of the second century BC. There is also a range of intermediate positions, which in recent years have gained much ground against both the more extreme views: some portion of the beginning of the work could go back to Dionysius, while the rest was written later, or the entire work (or sections of it) could be originally Dionysius' but seriously altered (and perhaps abridged) by later writers. Some argue that if the Τέχη is spurious, we must revise our whole view of the development of Greek grammatical thought, to put the creation of fully developed grammatical analysis in the first century BC. Others maintain that Aristarchus and his followers already possessed an advanced grammatical system and that the date of the Τέχη therefore makes little difference to our view of the evolution of grammar.
Eleanor Dickey. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises: From Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Kindle Locations 1294-1303). Kindle Edition.
To the best of my knowledge, the
general consensus currently is that only the beginning portion can be confidently attributed to Dionysius himself, with the rest of the treatise being from the later centuries. Also, OCD's statement in its entry on Dionysius Thrax that it has only been in recent years that Τέχη's authenticity has been questioned is very much false. As Dickey says, his authorship, "has been doubted since antiquity."
I hope that helps clarify things...