Ricerc@Sapienza

This PRIN PNRR projet, whose PI is Giancarlo Schirru, Università “L'Orientale”, Napoli, aims to examine the Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic versions of the Tékhne grammatiké traditionally ascribed to Dionysius Thrax. The Tékhne grammatiké (= TG), traditionally ascribed to Dionysius Thrax, can be considered the more organic result of the Classical Greek grammatical tradition in terms of systematic presentation of the technical terminology useful for the description of such a language in the levels of phonology and morphology. Most of the categorisations and technical terms displayed in TG, through their Latin adaptation and the subsequent use in the western languages, are still used as fundamental categories of traditional and school grammar and even in modern linguistics: the current set of morphosyntactic features is in part already displayed in the TG. Whatever should be the elaboration process of the text arranged by the tradition, a topic which is largely debated, it is undoubtedly that at least in the 3rd-4th century AD it was circulating as a crucial educational text of the Ancient World. Therefore, from the Greek side, the TG represents a “reflexive grammar” collecting a long and laboured tradition of conceptualisation of the language structures and development of technical terms in a consistent and complete metalanguage; such a process involved different philosophical schools and different disciplines (Logic, Rhetoric, Poetics, Philology etc. beside Grammar). Nevertheless, the TG soon became an “exogen grammar" for many other languages, offering the tools to develop a local grammar. Such a process was already called an “extended grammar”. The current project aims to examine the eastern side of such an extension through the cooperation of specialists in Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic linguistics and in the history of linguistics. The Armenian and the Syriac grammatical traditions have a meaningful starting point with the local translation of the TG; a possible influence of the TG (and more generally Greek) metalanguage on the Arab grammatic terminology was already supposed and should be studied.  Therefore, from one side, the project intends to collect and analyse the Greek terminology from the perspective of its eastern translation and adaptation: the TG, but also the grammatical terms present in other texts (for example, Aristotle’s treatises De interpretatione and Categoriae have Armenian, Syriac and Arabic translations and commentaries). On the other side, it intends to collect the Armenian and Syriac grammatical terminology illustrating their derivation from the Greek models and the presence of comparable cases in the earliest Arabic native grammar. The research unit of “La Sapienza”, Rome, will deal especially with the original Greek text of the Tékhne grammatiké and its Syriac version.