The grammarian was the conservator of all the discrete pieces of tradition embedded in his texts, from matters of prosody (to which Augustine refers in his characterization) to the persons, events, and beliefs that marked the limits of vice and virtue. But by virtue of his command of the poetic texts, the grammarian's guardianship extended to another, more general area, as guardian of tradition ( historiae custos). He was to protect the language against corruption, to preserve its coherence, and to act as an agent of control: thus, early in his history, we find the grammarian claiming the right to limit the grant of citizenship ( civitas) to new usages. grammarian was, first, the guardian of the language, custos Latini sermonis, in a phrase of Seneca, or 'guardian of articulate utterance,' in the description of Augustine.

Since grammar was always more widely studied than rhetoric, and often out of Donatus's text, his discussion insured that these ornaments of style were known in later centuries even to students who did not study rhetoric as a separate discipline. but his fuller Ars Grammatica goes beyond strictly grammatical subjects to discuss, in Book 3, barbarism and solecism as faults of style as well as a number of ornaments of style also discussed by rhetoricians.ĭonatus's treatment of tropes and figures had great authority and was substantially repeated in handbooks by the Venerable Bede and other later writers. The Ars Minor of Donatus, his most read work, is limited to discussion of the eight parts of speech. The most famous Roman grammarian was Aelius Donatus, who lived in the fourth century after Christ and whose works were the basic grammatical texts for the Middle Ages. Grammar schools provided training necessary for a student before he entered a school of rhetoric. The discipline of grammar developed parallel with that of rhetoric during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the two often overlapped. The grammarian is merely the one who knows how and why the child knows the language. But the grammarian is not the only one who knows the rules of the language they are well known, albeit unconsciously, also to the child. A child speaks his mother tongue properly, though he could never write out its grammar. says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules. The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself. More than once, plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax during the writing and revision of the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. It is not difficult to understand the very pallid status of linguistics in America.

The man who is in charge of grammar and is called a grammarian is regarded by all plain men as a frigid and dehumanized pedant.

Grammarian pro windows