Mr. John James
John James is a PhD student in Classics at SUNY, Buffalo, where he researches Ancient Greek grammarians. He received his BA in Classics from Hillsdale College and his MA in Ancient Philology from the Polis Institute in Jerusalem. His MA thesis “The Greek and Hebrew Background of σπλάγχνα in the New Testament” explored the Greek bodily and emotional metaphors connected to the Greek word σπλάγχνα from Homer to early Christianity. John is the Graduate Fellow of the Tesserae Project, a digital humanities project that identifies allusions among ancient authors. When not reading Ancient Greek, John likes to run, watch birds, and play the cello.
The First Grammar Book and the Goals of Grammatical Education
In its earliest form, γραμματική, or “the art of grammar,” was an “art of letters” that indicated not only the knowledge of language rules, but also skill in reading literature and textual criticism. Our earliest extant grammar manual, the Τέχνη Γραμματική (or Ars Grammatica) attributed to Dionysius Thrax, prescribes the six parts that constitute the art, beginning with facility in reading and leading to the evaluation and emendation of literary texts. In this way, analysis of language (in prosody, etymology, and morphology) was primarily practiced for the sake of reading, understanding, and curating texts, especially those of the best writers of antiquity. Grammar as we know it, the science that prescribes the rules of a given language, to a large degree grew out of this original enterprise. This sectional aims to deepen teachers’ understanding of the art of grammar and its objectives by illustrating what grammar was historically, especially as presented in the Τέχνη Γραμματική, with a view to what it may potentially encompass today in its scope and purpose.