The grammar in the «Etymologiae» by Saint Isidore

Abstract

Saint Isidore, in the «Etymologiae», characterizes the grammar, following the line of the Latin grammarians, as the science that teaches to speak correctly. The grammatical art, in which, in accordance with the trend of its epoch, the literary and the linguistic phenomena are included, consists of thirty sections. The sentence, as in the Greco-Latin tradition, is conceived with a semantic criterion as a succession of words with sense, and it is divided in eight parts (noun, pronoun, verb, participle, preposition, adverb, interjection, conjunction) that can be reducible in the last resort to the two distinguished by Plato and Aristotlein «Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας», noun and verb.