Although I don’t usually talk about medieval times, Monday’s posts are called Medieval Mondays, because I like alliteration. In these posts, I look at the history of the English language.
This post was prompted when I had a wee peek at my search terms, one of which was ‘how do they come up with grammar names’.
The word grammar itself has a rather wonderful etymology. It comes from the Greek grammatikē technē, which means “art of letters”.
I like this, because people too often dismiss grammar as being arbitrary, when actually it’s not only important for conveying meaning, but also an art in itself.
The word came from Greek via Latin and French in the fourteenth century. That’s not to say that the English language didn’t have grammar before then (indeed, Old English has a much more complicated grammar system than Present Day English does). The Old English stæfcræft, meaning ‘the art of grammar’, ‘grammar’, ‘skill in letters’, or ‘learning’ was supplanted by the French. Continue reading