Ancient and Medieval Thought on Greek Enclitics
Philomen Probert author Stephanie Roussou author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:17th Mar '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book has two complementary aims: to improve our grasp of the ideas about Greek enclitics that ancient and medieval scholars have passed down to us, and to show how a close examination of these sources yields new answers to questions concerning the facts of the ancient Greek language itself. New critical editions of the most extensive surviving ancient and medieval texts on Greek enclitics, together with translations into English, lay the foundations for an improved understanding of thought on Greek enclitics in those periods. Stephanie Roussou and Philomen Probert then draw out the main doctrines and the conceptual apparatus and metaphors that were used to think and talk about enclitic accents, consider the antiquity of these ideas within the Greek grammatical tradition, and make use of both ancient and medieval sources to explore two much-debated questions about the facts of the language itself. Firstly, the Greek sources turn out to shed new light first of all on the circumstances under which enclitic ἐsτί was used and the circumstances under which non-enclitic ἔsτι appeared. Secondly, ancient and medieval evidence from several directions comes together in a way that has gone unnoticed until now, and suggests a new answer to the question of how sequences of consecutive enclitics were accented in antiquity.
Probert and Roussou have done real groundwork here and have expanded our understanding of accents and enclitics in Greek in multiple ways […] Wherever there is a serious focus on accents and enclitics in Greek in the future, this book will be impossible to ignore. * Jonas Schollmeyer, GNOMON *
The thorough investigation in this book offers fresh insights into a rather marginal aspect of grammatical theories on Greek enclitics from classical antiquity down to this day. * Stefano Valente, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
[This] impressive volume [...] was authored by two scholars whose expertise and erudition in Greek accentuation - more specifically, in the ancient grammatical tradition concerning Greek accentuation - are widely recognized. * Éric Dieu, Histoire Épistémologie Langage *
Diligently working its way through the layers of more than 2,000 years of scholarly tradition on Ancient Greek accentuation, Roussou and Probert's monograph is well worth reading not just for classicists, but also for scholars from adjacent disciplines. It recommends itself to non-specialists by its down-to-earth approach rooted in language teaching and the actual editing of texts, and by the authors' fresh, engaging writing style. * Cassandra Freiberg, Folia Linguistica Historica *
At any rate, monographs like Roussou and Probert's inspire confidence that the present digital revolution will butstrengthen scholarly work on Greek as well as other ancient languages, providing new resources and methods for addressing apparent niche questions that are, on closer inspection, so important for understanding how those languages really worked. * Cassandra Freiberg, Folia Linguistica Historica 2025 *
ISBN: 9780192871671
Dimensions: 240mm x 163mm x 27mm
Weight: 728g
380 pages