Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
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Greek grammarian and philologist; pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace; and
alleged author of the Téchnē grammatikḗ (‘Art of
Grammar’), which became the standard grammar handbook in Constantinople
after the 5th cent. The attribution of the treatise to Dionysius has been
long debated, but there is now some agreement that the book is the result of
the compilation of chronologically heterogeneous materials. The work, of
which an Armenian translation also exists, was adapted into Syriac in the
6th cent. This translation is attributed by
maqryānā
(‘teacher of reading’)
Téchnē
grammatikḗ presents a contrastive analysis of Syriac and Greek,
and its reflection on Syriac morphosyntax shows a certain degree of
originality. In this adaptation the first ten chapters of the text are
missing. While the omission of chapters 2–9, which treat orthographic,
phonologic, and prosodic issues, can be explained with the difficulties of
applying Greek grammatical categories to the Syriac language, the absence of
the first, programmatic chapter has been tentatively related to a possible
reluctance on the part of the translator to praise the study of literary
pagan texts (Contini).