A Ars grammatica de Mário Plócio Sacerdote, a “primeira gramática latina”, e a tradição gramatical do século III

Abstract

Following the precepts established by Koerner (1995) and the methodology presented by Swiggers (2012) to the study of Historiography of Linguistics, this work, developed in the scope of the Post-Gratuation in Linguistics Program of the Federal Univerisity of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), aims at presenting an original commented translation of the first book of the first Latin grammatical treatise that reached us, attributed to Marius Plotius Sacerdos. To do so, we have investigated, in the first instance, the “climate of opinion” (KOERNER 1995) that concerned the grammarian and his work – which is divided in three books and dated back to the third century – as well as displayed the social context that surrounded the occupation of a grammarian during that time. Our next step was to analyse the corpus, establishing its structural division in order to conceive a better understanding of the text and pointing out some of its relevant aspects, based on the second principle proposed by Koerner (1995), the immanance principle. Finally, we have applied to our translation the principle of adequation (KOERNER, 1995) so that were made some approximations of the technical vocabulary, so the Latin terms did not lose their essence, instrinsic to the context in which they appear. The commented translation of the first book of Sacerdos’ ars, firstly, has allowed us to make a more detailed critical analysis and aims at, not only, providing the work access to people who do not master Latin or do not possess any knowledge about the Latin grammatical tradition, but also allowing the modern reader, through an intercultural and interlinguistic dialogue, to envisage, with the help of notes and commentaries, the excerpts that, a priori, would sound obscure – contributing to a better understanding of the text.