III. Comments on the description

The beginnings of linguistic analysis of the Greek language were made by philosophers. From the late -5th cent., the sophists combined rhetoric with exegesis of poetic texts. Plato, in his dialogue Krátylos (c. -385), distinguished between ónoma “noun” and rhẽma “verb”. Aristotle (in Perì hermeneíās and Topiká) extended the grammatical concepts and coined the term ptõsis (lit. “fall”) for the concept of case. The Stoic grammarians (from c. -200 on) refined the theory of language and grammar.

Greek philology started with the school of Alexandria in the late -4th cent. The spoken language was then the koine, which was almost 100 years away from Plato and (including previous oral tradition) 600 years after Homer. The Homeric epics were a national treasure and the works of Plato and contemporaries were already considered classical in the -3rd cent. Philology was founded to transmit these texts and to secure their understanding. Philological work with this purpose typically took the form of skhólia (commentaries). The first linguistic works proper were glosssaries of difficult words found in the Homeric epics.