Sunday, March 01, 2009

Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae

Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae now available (Latin version only) in the Logic Museum annex. I had ignored Priscian before, thinking of him as a grammarian. Which he is, mostly, but there are interesting philosophical and logical insights in this enormous work. Such as that the present time is that of which part is past, part is future (Book 8, p. 414). Scotus uses this to explain how a sentence in the present tense (e.g. "Robert is just passing through the door") may be true even when the event it refers to may just be over.

Praesens tempus est cuius pars praeteriit, parsque futura est

4 comments:

Hermeros said...

Please, do quote the source of the Latin text you have put into your website:

http://kaali.linguist.jussieu.fr/CGL/index.jsp

You have enterely copied it. Spelling conventions, page numbers, encoding of literary quotations, Unicode Greek come not from Hertz but from our work!

Prof. Alessandro Garcea
CGL Online - Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum

Edward Ockham said...

Apologies. This entry is now removed

Anonymous said...

I cannot reach the website Priscianus'Institutiones grammaticae.

I need the text. Can you help me?

Pieter van Walbeek

Edward Ockham said...

Hi Pieter. It's still there in Alessandro's website that he links to above. I just tried it. Go to 'texts', then 'Priscian', then 'institutiones'.