LINGUIST List 17.735

Thu Mar 09 2006

Sum: Priscian Quote

Editor for this issue: Amy Renaud <renaudlinguistlist.org>

Directory         1.    Edward McDonald, Priscian quote
Message 1: Priscian quote
Date: 08-Mar-2006
From: Edward McDonald <laomaa20023yahoo.com.cn>
Subject: Priscian quote


Regarding query: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-661.html#2

Many thanks to those who responded so promptly to my request for the source of the Priscian quote: in order, Brian Nolan, Michael Covington, Frank Esterhill, & Mark Amsler. Various sources were given. The one I think I probably took it from - but didn't note down where, always a mistake! - was

P.H. Matthews. 2001. A Short History of Structural Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

A similar quote can be found in

Michael Covington. 1984. Syntactic Theory in the High Middle Ages.Cambridge University Press.

''Priscian's theory of syntactic structure, insofar as he has one, is elegantly simple. Phonological elements (litterae, or more properly elementa) go together to form syllables (syllabae); syllables make up words (dictiones); and words are put together to form sentences (orationes).''

The original Latin can be found in

Instutiones Grammaticae in vol. 2 of Heinrich Keil's. Grammatici latini ex recensione Henrici Keilii. Published: Lipsiae, in aedibvs B. G. Tevbneri, 1857-80. (''Lipsia'' I assume is ''Leipzig'')

Mark Amsler adds: Priscian, by the way, cribbed it from Donatus and it appears in ancient and early medieval grammars in one form or another.

And, readers of Linguist List may be interested to compare it with the following quote from Chomsky (1957: 13)

...I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written forms are languages in this sense, since each natural language has a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet) and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (or letters), though there are infinitely many sentences...

thanks again to all

Ed McDonald School of Asian Studies University of Auckland

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics