Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum: Accès aux sources grammaticales de la Latinité tardive: recherche, parcours textuels et bibliographie

[First posted in AWOL  27 March 2011. Updated 11 November 2018]

Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum

The corpus of texts known as the Grammatici Latini collection comprises the Latin grammar manuals written between the 2nd and 7th centuries AD and edited by Heinrich Keil in Leipzig, from 1855 to 1880. Keil’s philological criteria are now to some extent outdated; his selection and collation are incomplete and not always reliable; some works are represented only partly or simply by a specimen. Therefore, in our corpus, we replaced Keil’s edition by the most recent ones, whenever available, and works that were published in an incomplete form in Keil have been integrated in later, complete, editions.
The editorial choices are faithfully reproduced. Nevertheless, we provide an autonomous text, which is the result of a systematic work of ‘pre-edition’.
As Valeria Lomanto (‘A Concordance to Keil’s Latin Grammarians’, Computer and the Humanities 24, 1990, 429-430) wrote, ‘The pre-edition consists of a number of operations which aim to make the texts homogeneous from the point of view of form and to insert information which, while not present in the actual texts, may be gathered from the philological and exegetic tradition.
All references extraneous to the text are eliminated, namely:

1. the numbering of books, chapters and paragraphs;
   
2. the single or double slash which marked the end of pages in previous editions;
   
3. all references both within a work and to other works;
   
4. the attribution of quotations;
   
5. isolated dashes or those which oppose an erroneous form to a correct one or which indicate the passage to another topic or which replace the word;
   
6. the variants given in brackets.
   

We should note the following points concerning orthography and punctuation:

1. consonantal and vocalic “i” and “u” respectively are not distinguished;
   
2. the use of capitals is restricted to proper names (divinities, people, ethnica and their derivates, toponyms and the names of months and festivities);
   
3. the accentuation of Greek is modified whenever it fails to conform to standard practice;
   
4. correction of punctuation is limited to the removal of certain aberrations, especially in the Greek;
   
5. parentheses are no longer marked by dashes but by round brackets in the case of whole phrases and by commas in the case of single words;
   
6. to enable the collation of parallel passages all abbreviations have been expanded. This regards proper names, the initials of words forming quotations, abridged writing and so on.
   

[…] The titles of works quoted appear in italics.
The quotations appear within the text. […] In dialogues every change of speaker is indicated by a double colon. Quoted passages are always distinguished by the marks « » which replace inverted commas, indents, character spacings and italics. Therefore, the inverted commas recurring in the editions are eliminated when they single out isolated forms which illustrate a grammatical rule and are replaced by hyphens when they mark segments of words.
The system of scansion of the verse is unified through the use of dots which replace division of the words or subscript signs. All accents are eliminated.
The following conventional diacritic signs are used:

1. { } for deletions;
   
2. ‹ › for insertions replacing the italics with which they were indicated in the oldest editions;
   
3. ( ) for expanded forms;
   
4. * for gaps and in the place of dots or of formulae such as aliquid desideratur, deest folium unum, etc. used in the oldest editions;
   
5. † for loci desperati.
   

The omissions carried out by the editor are marked by [...] which replaces the dashes, sometimes preceded by “etc.” or "κτλ." or by some other token of similar meaning.’
For lists of relevant examples, see:
– Grilli A., N. Marinone, V. Lomanto et al. (1979), ‘Concordanza dei Grammatici Latini’, Suppl. Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Cl. sc. mor., st. e filol., 112.
– Lomanto V. (1983), Concordantiae in Q. Aurelii Symmachi Opera, Hildesheim, Olms, vii-ix.
– Lomanto V. – N. Marinone (1994), ‘Philologie et informatique: résultats et projets’, Revue Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines (RISSH) 30, 55-74.
For the sake of general coherence, titles, attributions and structure of some texts have been modified. Thus, for example, the pseudo-Fronto in GL 7,515-532 (= 387-403 Barwick) and the anonymous de idiomatis generum in GL 4,573-584 (= 450-463 Barwick) have been recorded under Charisius’ name; Marius Victorinus sections in GL 6,31,17-173,31 + 174,1-184,14 are registered under Aphthonius’ name.
The initiative to associate some automated procedures with an index, a concordance or a lexicon of the Latin artes Grammaticae was first launched in the middle of the seventies by Nino Marinone, professor of the History of the Latin language at the University of Turin, in cooperation with her colleague Valeria Lomanto, and Andrea Bozzi, researcher at the Istituto di Linguistica computazionale (ILC-CNR) in Pisa. As personal computers did not yet exist at that time, the work was to be issued in a printout edition. The tool was designed to give researchers in-depth access to the texts and to constitute a basis for new critical editions, by formalizing the authors’ language and proceeding to a systematic collation of the parallel passages. The actual version of this project, granting free on-line access to the entire corpus, has been made possible by a three-year funding granted by the French National Research Agency (ANR JC 2006-2009), the support of the Intitut Universitaire de France, and the collaboration of Clément Plancq and Franck Cinato at the Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques (HTL), CNRS - University of Paris-Diderot. The project is directed by Alessandro Garcea (University of Paris-Sorbonne) and Valeria Lomanto (University of Turin).