The Latin of Roman Grammarians. Introduction

What can Roman grammarians tell us about their language from a modern linguistic perspective? The book brings together scholars interested in Roman grammarians from a variety of areas, from manuscript research to modern sociolinguistics and the history of Latin. Their combined effort tries to elicit a wide-ranging, comparative picture of cutting edge research on Roman grammar, with special focus on the Roman grammarians' perception of linguistic change in Latin, sociopragmatic variation, and linguistic interference from Greek. Grammarians were not simply transmitters of rules: they also spoke the language of their times and were alert to social and pragmatic variations of usage, and at the same time reflected the formation of new latin standards different from the language of the syllabus authors (Pompeius, Consentius, Medieval authors of artes grammaticae).