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home / papers / 2021 / The Syriac grammatical tradition as an «extension» of Greek grammar: the parts of speech and the participle

The Syriac grammatical tradition as an «extension» of Greek grammar: the parts of speech and the participle

Original (French): La tradition grammaticale syriaque comme « extension » de la grammaire grecque. Les parties du discours et le participe

Summary

This article reads Syriac grammatical thought as one branch of the "extended Greek grammar" framework, in which Greek categories were transplanted into other languages. Farina asks how long the Greek model stayed in force and how Syriac scholars reshaped it. She works through primary texts from the 6th to the 13th century. The starting point is Joseph Huzaya's Syriac version of the (Pseudo-)Dionysius Thrax Technè grammatikè, followed by Jacob of Edessa's Tūraṣ mamllā and later grammarians. She sets these against other influences: Aristotelian logic in Syriac translation, a native reading-and-pointing (orthoepic) tradition, and, from the 9th century, Arabic linguistics. The first part follows how the eight parts of speech and their terminology changed over time. The second part focuses on the participle. Her central claim is that Syriac grammarians treated the "participle" as a syntactic construction, linked to nominal predication, rather than as a morphological class of word forms. The study shows a borrowed descriptive framework being kept on the surface while it is quietly redefined to fit a structurally different language.

Key points

  • Huzaya's 6th-century Technè is a very literal adaptation of the Greek. Syriac has no declension, so prepositions stand in for the cases, yet the accident ptōsis is kept under the name mappeltā ("fall").
  • The Syriac Technè begins only at chapter 11. The first ten chapters (accents, punctuation, phonetics) were left out, probably because they did not suit Syriac and a separate orthoepic tradition already existed.
  • The eight parts of speech are each given a calqued Syriac term plus a Greek transliteration, e.g. šmā/ʾonoma (noun) and šawtpūtā/mētōkē (participle). Later the meanings of memrā and meltā swap: from Jacob of Edessa onward, meltā means "verb" and memrā means "discourse".
  • Arabic influence is partial. Elias of Ṭirhan (11th c.) and Barhebraeus (13th c.) adopt Arabic metalanguage, while Bar Šakko and Bar Zoʿbi stay closer to the Greek model.
  • Farina adds caveats to Bohas's hypothesis that Barhebraeus had a full translation of Technè chapter 6. She does this through a philological look at the loanword ʾesṭūksā and its variants.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When a source framework has a category that the target language does not mark morphologically, keep the abstract feature and record how the target actually realizes it, as Huzaya kept ptōsis but expressed it through prepositions.
  • I2. A category can be defined by the construction a form appears in rather than by its form, as with the Syriac view of the participle as a predicative structure.
  • I3. The same technical term can change meaning between authors, as memrā and meltā did between Huzaya and Jacob of Edessa, so each label needs to be read against its source.
  • I4. Leave out the parts of a borrowed system that clearly do not fit the target language, and let a native method cover them, as the Syriac Technè did by skipping the phonetic chapters.
  • I5. Two independent analysis traditions, Greek-style grammar and diacritic pointing, ran side by side, and some authors tried to reconcile them.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): UD dialect conversion could keep a language-neutral role feature and map case-to-adposition realizations explicitly, so nothing is lost or invented.
  • I2 (frames): English participles and -ing forms could get their frame roles from their syntactic configuration (predicative, attributive, adverbial clause), not from the POS tag alone.
  • I3 (world): ontology imports from WordNet, FrameNet and Wikidata could store which resource and version a label's meaning comes from, so that label drift does not silently merge different concepts.
  • I4 (tokens): orthography- and tokenizer-specific rules should be built for English itself, not ported from rules written for other languages.
  • I5 (learn): silver data from witness parsers could keep each system's analysis visible and record explicit reconciliation rules, rather than collapsing disagreements into a single vote.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Part-of-speech tagging Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

 Institutions

🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France83 works · 59,287 citations🎓Université Paris CitéParis · France11 works · 1,368 citations

Also on the byline: Histoire des Théories Linguistiques.

Cite

Cite as Margherita Farina. 2021. La tradition grammaticale syriaque comme « extension » de la grammaire grecque. Les parties du discours et le participe. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 43.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4000/hel.402

@inproceedings{farina2021la,
  title = {{La tradition grammaticale syriaque comme « extension » de la grammaire grecque. Les parties du discours et le participe}},
  author = {Margherita Farina},
  booktitle = {Histoire Épistémologie Langage 43},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.4000/hel.402},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4000/hel.402}
}

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