Thrax Quotes

I had never seen war, or even talked of it at length with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of violence, and so believed that war would be no more than a new experience for me, as other things—the possession of authority in Thrax, say, or my escape from the House Absolute—had been new experiences. War is not a new experience; it is a new world. Its inhabitants are more different from human beings than Famulimus and her friends. Its laws are new, and even its geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities. Just as our familiar Urth holds such monstrosities as Erebus, Abaia, and Arioch, so the world of war is stalked by the monsters called battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a life and intelligence of their own, and whom one approaches through an ever-thickening array of portents.

The Hellenistic grammarian Dionysius Thrax (c. 170-90 B.C.) listened to the lectures of Aristarchus during his early years. His most enduring contribution to the study of language was The Art of Grammar, an extensive treatise focusing primarily on the classification of nouns and verbs.

If notional definitions are so problematic, it is worth asking why they persist. One reason is that they have a long tradition in English grammar, largely because grammars of English are based on the terminology found in classical Greek and Roman grammars. For instance, the notional definition of a sentence as a “complete thought” can be traced back to Dionysius Thrax’s Greek grammar written ca. 100 BC. Linguists of the modern era have modified this terminology as a result of advances in linguistic science and the need to have terminology that describes languages that are very different from Greek, Latin, English, and other Indo-European languages – the languages upon which traditional grammar is based.