Talk:The Art of Grammar

Untitled
Stub -- more content of the grammar is described on the article for thrax himself Perhaps some external references to the readable Greek text are in order And other non Thraxine discussion, like scholarly argumentation on authorship 60.225.219.76 (talk) 23:48, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2021 and 10 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hlkilbourne.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 10:58, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Definite article
In its time, putting a definite article (if they had any use in the classical languages) in a title was not done; in modern English it's almost reflexive, as illustrated by the barbaric usage "The Art of Grammar" in previous revisions of the lead sent. But "The Art of Grammar" and "Art of Grammar" are both legitimate translated titles. --Jerzy•t 23:55, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * What is "barbaric" about prefixing a title with "the"? It's civilized in English. The relevant question is whether the title is usually given in English with or without the article. — Eru·tuon 00:50, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
 * It sez here that i meant "solecistic", but the problem at issue was the dicey syntax, and apparently we're both satisfied with The Art of Grammar (w/respect to which i lacked the specialized knowledge, and the research time to gain it, necessary for practicing primum non nocere by means other than redundancy). IMO, "The Art of Grammar" is not significantly more (nor less) acceptable than "The The Shining...", which IMO can only end well when pronounced like "Thee thuh ..." and followed by e.g. "... that was written as a tribute by one of King's fans ...". And all's well that ends well. --Jerzy•t 20:58, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm satisfied with italicizing the definite article there, but either we need to move this article to The... or modify the link text so that it doesn't include the definite article. — Eru·tuon 22:00, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * [Chuckle] I'm trying to decide whether WP:AGF counsels me to assume you're being generous in including me in the decision by saying "we", or to assume you wouldn't say that with the intention of pushing the needed work off on me!  But seriously, and showing an oz. of generosity myself.... ....Your concern about the detailed title, while IMO not mandatory, is laudable & and deserves my cooperation at least in thinking it thru.   And having progressed that far, it occurs to me that the existence of a redirect at the other name means we need an admin to delete the Rdr so we can accomplish the prescribed move of the existing article to the existing Rdr's title. So if you were hinting i should do something, it just might be that you noted my admin status and realized it would simplify things if i took on that role. And while i wouldn't fault a colleague who felt it was overly meticulous to insist on having the title of the article match the start of the lead that precisely (there are times when doing so would be less sensible), i respect your discomfort (and BTW share it more than not).   The remaining issue in my mind is that (while G-tests were institutionalized to identify the primary topic rather than the ideal article title) i'd rather do a G-test (or even a limited manual count, if "The" is ignored even inside a quoted phrase) and give it a chance to change our collective mind. So if another day-or-less of delay is satisfactory to you, i'd be happy to move forward in that direction.   Oh, and BTW, that also creates an opportunity to perhaps trip over the feasibility having a list of translations, and thereby (inter alia) provide users some insight into the relative popularities of the two titles. --Jerzy•t 04:54, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * My creating a "we" for both of us is mainly due to the necessity of cooperation and consensus on Wikipedia, which helps to avoid edit wars and shouting matches, and other unhelpful things. No danger of that here, though. On the question of adding "The" to the article title, taking a look at existing practice is a good idea. Examples of an Ancient Greek work with "The" is The Republic (Plato). On the other side is Statesman (dialogue), which lacks "The", and the policy article on this, WP:THE, doesn't prescribe anything for translations. Not really sure what should be done, and I'm not calling on you as an admin to make the decision, just recognizing that the decision must be made cooperatively.


 * Perhaps a way to decide would be to see if "The" is capitalized (in the middle of sentences, obviously) when "The Art of Grammar" is mentioned in articles or books. Maybe that's what you mean by G-test. Also, this is a rather small question to be talking so much about, but I guess that's in my nature. — Eru·tuon 05:26, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Just for clarity, i wasn't offering to make the decision, as admin or otherwise, but rather to perform, if we so decide, one of the things that only an admin can do: the act of deleting the existing Rdr, which is necessary since in a Rename operation no page can obliterate another (a measure for preserving edit history). (As long as no one has done cut-and-paste moves on it, losing the history of a Rdr page is almost always a pretty trivial loss.) --Jerzy•t 18:45, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh, instead of "no page can obliterate another" i should have said "moving a page can obliterate another page only when the obliteree has a special property, something along the lines of every revision of it being a redirect." And i don't recall whether that rule of thumb limits BLP actions. (Hmm, maybe it's a matter of even BLP "deletions" preserving the content, but hiding it from anyone but admins; for the moment, that sounds right.) --Jerzy•t 02:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * That's in my nature, too, and while i'm not sure i'd favor a world where everyone has that nature, i think our tribe have special value many places in the human world. WP might fail if all its editors were like me (and sometimes my love wonders what we're doing together), but i ain't-agonna change. --Jerzy•t 02:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Google evidence
Googling for the author with the three-word and four-word titles (in each case in quotes) "works": four words, "About 2,390 results"; three words, "About 2,810 results". While the raw numbers are suggestive, doing the math goes further, viz.
 * 2,390 articles that start the title, at least once (in each article), with "the";
 * 420 that use it without "the" at least once (in each article), and never use it with "the".

IMO, we know that only about a fifth of uses of these obvious English titles, within the context of mentioning the author's full standard name, consider the "the" title unworthy of mention (but we would have to examine a representative sample of the other 4/5 to know what fraction among them ignored "Art of Grammar", and what fraction mention both). I don't strongly favor mentioning both titles, but i do think more evidence would be needed to overcome the presumption that "The" is preferred. Thus i agree with your suggestion that the rename to the 4-word title should be done. If you still agree, i'll proceed. (I think you were unfamiliar with the Google-test concept; the reason i qualified my invocation of it is that i can't clearly recall any mention of the expression where the purpose was other than a substitute for other imagined ways of determining whether one given word or phrase refers, in a simple majority of the Web pages that use it, to one potential WP-article topic. If yes, the "bare" title goes on the article for that topic (and the Dab page's title ends with " (disambiguation)"); if no, the "bare" title goes on the Dab page, and the various articles "that lost out" each get some other title -- which (on a per article basis) may or not be the "bare" title followed by something in parentheses.) --Jerzy•t 02:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm actually familiar with the concept of googling a pair of words to determine which is used more frequently, but I'd never heard of it being abbreviated to "G-test". I thought "G-test" was some math concept that I'd never heard of, like "chi-squared test". It sounds like it's usual to include "The" in the name, so as far as I'm concerned, it's fine to move the article. If anyone else objects, at least there's a good argument for the move. — Eru·tuon 04:13, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

By the way...
Have you a view on what the significance is, at this page, of the inclusion of "Ars Grammatica"? The Latin title for the translated work, or for the Koine work? An assertion that the work is properly part of the Ars grammatica (or should it, on this talk page, read the ars grammatica, and/or have "the" omitted? A description, and maybe a subtitle, but not a title, for the work bearing it? (Pretty much just curious.) --Jerzy•t 03:00, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Ars grammatica is just the usual Latin translation of the Greek phrase Τέχνη Γραμματική, and means, in Modern English terms, "grammar" or "description of a language" just like the Greek phrase does. There's nothing special or different about the Latin grammatical tradition; it's largely an importation of the Koine Greek one, with many of the same terms transliterated or loan-translated into Latin. I have no idea why the Latin translation of the title of Dionysius's work is given on the Greek Wikisource; perhaps there's a Latin translation of Dionysius's work, but I've never heard of one. — Eru·tuon 04:22, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm a self-proclaimed know-it-all, not a serious polymath, so i'm not bold enuf to assert that Ars grammatica deserves a hatnote like --Jerzy•t 06:09, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Heehee. Well, I doubt a hatnote is needed. I'm not sure if Dionysius's work is ever actually referred to under the Latin name, aside from on the Greek Wikisource... — Eru·tuon 06:40, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Koine speakers & "their" Greek ancestors
"... speakers of Koine Greek ... Homer and other great poets of their past" implies in context that all speakers of Koine were of Greek descent but IIRC Koine was a lingua franca thruout the territory of what had been Alexander's empire, or at least of its western end. There've probably been European historians who believed or even declared that Greek &/or Macedonian genes were what transformed those cultures, but if it were true, we'd hear white racists using the DNA evidence to prove it. --Jerzy•t 00:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm puzzled as to how the context implies that "speakers of Koine Greek" refers to ethnic Greeks. It's certainly true that Koine Greek was spoken by people of many different nations, and as far as I know, Dionysius wasn't excluding non-Greeks from his audience. It's true that Dionysius was writing primarily to help people read Greek literature. He quotes Homeric names as examples in his chapter on nouns and gives lines from the Iliad and Odyssey in many of his chapters, including the one on sounds or letters (the bits set off with indentation and having Greek numerals and line numbers after them). This doesn't imply that he was only writing for ethnic Greeks; people of other nations read Greek literature, such as the Romans. — Eru·tuon 04:37, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for speaking up abt your puzzlement, which results from my misreading "the" as "their" (and not double checking it). I've reverted that part of my bad, ugly edit. --Jerzy•t 05:53, 28 March 2015 (UTC)