Led by Priscian of Caesarea Simulacrum
About this course
Priscian returns for the last two of his eighteen books, and it should be said at the outset what they are: the first substantial treatment of Latin syntax that anybody wrote. Not the best, not the most systematic — the first. Sixteen books had established the parts of speech from the sound upward. These two take up what no Latin grammarian before him had attempted: how words join.
Later ages called the first sixteen Priscianus maior and the last two Priscianus minor, and the naming misleads. The two books are not an appendix to the sixteen. They are what the sixteen were for.
A promissory note from Module 2 comes due here. Priscian defined a word as pars minima orationis constructae — the least part of the constructed utterance. That qualifier could not be cashed for sixteen books, and it was doing real work: a word, on his account, is not a thing that stands alone and happens to be usable in sentences. It is defined by its role in a construction.
His method will feel strange to anyone trained on modern grammar, and the strangeness is worth stating plainly rather than discovering. He has no subject and predicate, no phrase structure, no dependency diagrams. What he has is the verb as the thing a construction turns on, and the question — asked of every joining — what does this word demand, and why? The answer comes from the meaning and form of the demanding word, not from a structural position. He is doing semantics to explain morphology, and it works more often than you would expect.
The module ends on a question he never settled: usage decides, and yet the language has a system, and those two principles do not sit together. He wrote eighteen books standing on both feet at once. Apollonius, whom he follows and names, did not settle it either.
Led by Priscian of Caesarea Simulacrum
The question
Eight sittings on Priscian's Books XVII and XVIII. You begin by
Outcome
The student can analyse a Latin sentence by locating the verb first
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A pupil has constructed a Latin sentence that is, by every rule he has been taught, correct. The government is right, the agreement is right, the order unremarkable. He can justify every choice from the account he was given. And no Latin author has ever written a sentence like it — you know this, and you cannot say precisely why it is wrong, only that it is not Latin. He asks, quite reasonably, what rule he has broken.
Your goals