James Grimm and his transcendental juncture

Abstract

For more than two millennia of our history, today's linguistics was built on rudimentary bases yes, but firm, of cyclopean and lasting persistence. Before a thousand and eight hundred, on the long road, of more than two millennia, traveled through the philological and language studies, which in modern times would reach the category of science, were seated transcendental milestones: the Grammar of the Greek Dionysus of Thrace (tejné grammatiké) in the 2nd century a.C., crystallization of the philological comments of its predecessors, on the Greek texts; the Latin Varrón in the 1st century, heir and augmenter of the work of the Thracian Dionysus; Pristian in the 5th century of our Age, who with his Grammar of eighteen books and about a thousand pages, is the scholar who collects the systematized description of Latin linguistic studies and classical literature.
Then, during the late twelfth century, the thirteenth century and part of the XIV, within the framework of scholastic philosophy, give a considerable contribution the speculative modistae or gramatics, whose theories almost unknown in our times, bear the name of modi significandi. Hence modistae.
The Renaissance, a long period in which most of the features that characterize the contemporary period are undoubtedly incubated, presents itself as a two-sided Janus: on the one hand it looks back, rediscovering and valorating the classic Greco-Roman world in the manuscripts of the texts brought by the Greek sages as they fled westward, when in 1453 Constantinople falls , last remnant of the Roman Empire; on the other hand, this rebirth tends its gaze to a suggestive and suggestive future for the possibility of expansion offered to all of Europe from Marco Polo's travels to the Far and Legendary East, and by Christopher Columbus' arrival in a new world in 1492. As far as linguistics are concerned, in this effervescent period, knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew grammars and languages, as well as that of Oriental and American languages, becomes a ferment of renewal.