Historiographia Linguistica - Online First

Cet article se décompose en deux parties. Dans la première partie, je traduis et analyse un texte extrait du Šarḥ al-Kāfiya du grammairien Raḍī al-dīn al-ʾAstarābāḏī (m. après 688/1289), montrant qu’il reconnaît deux types de présuppositions : syntaxiques, liées à une relative, et pragmatiques, liées à la situation d’énonciation. L’intonation étant la grande absente de la grammaire arabe, la situation d’énonciation peut s’interpréter comme un dialogue réel ou virtuel, où l’énoncé répond à une question explicite ou implicite auquel est lié un présupposé. Je propose de comprendre ainsi un passage problématique de la Muqaddima d’Ibn Ḫaldūn (m. 808/1406). Dans la seconde partie, je restitue ce texte dans son contexte, celui de l’opération dite al-ʾiḫbār bi-llaḏī ʾaw bi-l-ʾalif wa-l-lām et consistant à faire d’un nom d’une phrase 1 le propos d’une phrase nominale 2 au moyen d’une relative. Si cette opération est interprétable par les linguistes arabisants d’aujourd’hui comme une transformation syntaxique et sémantique de focalisation, pour les grammairiens arabes eux-mêmes c’est un simple exercice scolaire, lié à la question du ʾiʿrāb des noms (flexion casuelle), permettant de vérifier leur indéclinabilité ou déclinabilité, parfaite ou imparfaite. Je montre comment ce sens particulier de ʾiḫbār s’articule avec les deux grands sens de ce terme en grammaire arabe, eux-mêmes liés aux deux sens de ḫabar (propos d’une phrase nominale ou énoncé assertif, positif ou négatif).

In this contribution, I investigate the conceptual and terminological relation between ‘prepositions’ (preposiciones) and a set of suffixes, mainly case markers, in Bertonio’s (1603) and Torres Rubio’s (1616) Aymara grammars. These morphemes are classified as prepositions or inflectional markers, or even both at the same time. This overlap is motivated by the typological differences between the language described, Aymara, and the metalanguage, Latin, since the former does not feature a full equivalent to Latin prepositions and encodes most grammatical relations by suffixation. The analysis reveals that the distinction between prepositions and case markers is established on functional grounds and based on the comparison with Latin categories.

The present study investigates who was considered authoritative in matters of language in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as how grammar authors position themselves with respect to these authorities. It evaluates whether a shift in referencing norms may already be observed from the 16th to the 17th century in these regards.

As it is claimed that in England the 16th century marks the beginning of English grammar writing (McCarthy 2020: 19–20) and the 17th century saw a shift in favour of English being recognized as a separate academic discipline (Beal 2004: 102), one can ask if and how onomastic — that is, name-based — references, appear in those grammars and how they can be categorized.

One of the findings of this study is that the onomastic references found in the 16th- and 17th-century grammars can be categorized along the six semantic categories suggested in previous work for 19th-century grammars (Busse et al. 2020: 11–12). These include, for example, quotations, opinions, or mere mentions. To account for a possible shift in reference strategies over time, these semantic categories were reevaluated by means of inter-rater reliability (IRR) in the 16th- and 17th-century context.

Our main findings show that while some 16th-century authors put emphasis on Latinate authors, others embrace moving away from the Latinate approach by not referring to the established Latinate authorities at all or only rarely. A significant shift in onomastic referencing can be observed from the 16th to the 17th century, however the Latinate authorities still held significant ground in the 18th century grammar texts.

This article challenges the widespread textbook claim that “etymology boasts a venerable history of its own” (Malkiel), which implies that the history of etymology predates that of linguistics. On the contrary, it is argued that etymology, defined as “the search for the relationships—formal and semantic — that link a word with another unit that historically precedes it and from which it derives” (Zamboni), is a scientific discipline with a much shorter history than (synchronic) linguistics, mathematics or physics. The reason is obvious: despite occasional affirmative answers to questions such as “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans do historical linguistics?”, historical linguistics as a scientific discipline dates back little more than two centuries, while any text/author from earlier periods has no place in the history of a modern scientific discipline comparable to that, for example, of Archimedes in the history of physics and geometry. With this in mind, it is proposed here to distinguish sharply an etymology2, i.e. scientific etymology, from its pre-modern precursors, indicated instead with the label etymology1. The latter, it is argued, has three features that distinguish it from etymology2: the ‘truth-seeking’, the ‘non-uniqueness’, and the ‘semantic’ bias. The ways in which these biases affect discussions about the origin of words of the type defined here as etymology1 are illustrated by drawing on various texts and cultures, from Antiquity to the 18th century.