From literacy to grammar

In the Cratylus Socrates refers to ‘those who are skilled in vowels and consonants’, and Aristotle mentions grammarians (grammatikoi). In any literate society there are teachers whose job it is to impart the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy. In ancient Greece the origins of the profession are encoded in the name: grammatikos (the singular of grammatikoi) is visibly derived from gramma ‘letter’ (plural grammata). Of course, one can teach someone to read without any grammatical concepts more sophisticated than ‘letter’, ‘sound’ and ‘word’: equivalent terms are found in all literate societies, and in most, if not all, preliterate societies. In other words, the ability to read and write – and by implication to devise a writing system – does not presuppose an extensive repertoire of linguistic concepts, still less a well-developed system of grammar or theoretical linguistics. What is it that gives the impetus to move on to that stage? In ancient India the desire to preserve an older, more ‘correct’ form of pronunciation was the spur for the description of the articulatory phonetics of Sanskrit; in the medieval Arab world the need of foreign converts to Islam for instruction in Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, together with a feeling of nostalgia for the ancient language of the Beduin, lay behind the first grammars; but in the Greek world the motivation for the writing of grammars is less clear.