The findings open up possibilities for further work on interactions between the Greek and Latin grammatical traditions, and especially for extending the work beyond prosody to other areas of grammar.
A working group on the long-term histories of grammatical traditions is being funded as part of this grant. This group is pooling its knowledge of numerous different grammatical traditions in order to identify processes that occur readily in very different cultural settings, and others that are tied to particular cultural circumstances.
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Key Findings
I set out to find out how concepts and categories of ancient Greek thought on prosody are reinterpreted and transformed in the light of changes in the ancient Greek language, and how these concepts and categories are understood by Latin grammarians using them to write about Latin prosody. Key findings so far include the following:
(1) In some instances, our earliest clearly datable evidence for a concept of Greek grammatical thought on prosody comes from a Latin text in which the concept has already been taken over for Latin. Latin grammatical texts are therefore important not only for our understanding of Latin grammatical thought about Latin prosody (and the take-up of Greek grammatical thought in this tradition), but can also lead us to a better understanding of the Greek tradition itself.
(2) A key text for our understanding of early Greek thought on prosody is likely to have been influenced by the Latin tradition. To a greater extent than has been anticipated, we therefore need to reckon with the possibility of a two-way dialogue between the ancient Greek and Latin grammatical traditions.