Orbis Linguarum – serie

This book contains the first Dutch translation (with ample notes), of the oldest grammatical manual in the West, Dionysius Thrax's Tékhne Grammatike, dating to the second/first century B.C. The translation, based on a thorough philological reexamination of the Greek text, is preceded by an extensive introduction, dealing with the textual transmission of the Greek manual, the background of Dionysius's grammatical conceptions (rooted in philosophical, rhetorical and philological theories and practices), the structure of the manual, and the grammaticographical approach; it also contains a critical synthesis of the debate on the authenticity of the manual and its relationship to Alexandrian grammatical scholarship. The edition of the Greek text of the Tekhne is followed by a brief account of the methodological principles adopted for the translation into Dutch, and by the Dutch translation, supplemented with some hundred notes on questions of terminology and doctrine. To the Dutch translation is appended W. Kürchner's newly revised German translation of the Tekhne, preceded by a note on the translation technique. The book is rounded off with a very detailed terminological concordance of the technical terms and expressions in the Tekne and their German and Dutch translations, following the order of appearance of the terms in the Greek text, and by an exhaustive bibliography on the text editions and the translations of the tekhne, and a bibliographical survey on ancient grammar, and on the Tekhne grammatike in particular.