De Causis Linguae Latinae (Lyon, 1540) / Des causes de la langue latine. Jules-César Scaliger,. Ed. and trans. Pierre Lardet, Geneviève Clerico, and Bernard Colombat,. 2 vols. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 594. Geneva: Droz, 2018. 2,222 pp. $222

First published in Lyon in 1540, the irascible Julius Caesar Scaliger's De Causis Linguae Latinae has remained one of his less studied works. Grammar, in his understanding, is neither an art nor some kind of empirical knowledge, but a science, and Scaliger's De Causis is, accordingly, not...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Renaissance Quarterly 2020, Vol.73 (4), p.1331-1334
Main Author: Deitz, Luc
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Adverbs
Conjunctions
Etymology
Grammar
Interjections
Latin language
Literary translation
Participles
Prepositions
Rhetorical figures
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Summary:First published in Lyon in 1540, the irascible Julius Caesar Scaliger's De Causis Linguae Latinae has remained one of his less studied works. Grammar, in his understanding, is neither an art nor some kind of empirical knowledge, but a science, and Scaliger's De Causis is, accordingly, not a Latin primer for beginners but a philosophical reflection on grammar and language on Aristotelian lines, with an eminently polemical thrust to it (the work is preceded by a list of no fewer than 632 errors apparently committed by his predecessors, which Scaliger, never one to doubt his own worth, sets out to correct). Book 3 covers the notion of word and highlights the differences existing between the eight traditional classes or categories, the treatment of which takes up books 4–11 (changeable words—nouns, verbs, pronouns, participles—in books 4–7; unchangeable words—prepositions, adverbs, interjections, and conjunctions—in books 8–11).
ISSN:0034-4338
1935-0236
DOI:10.1017/rqx.2020.224