Panhuis’ Latin Grammar
Anybody out there in the ether have any thoughts on Dirk Panhuis’ recent (Eng. tr. 2006) Latin Grammar (U. of Michigan Press)? I’ve been reading some parts of it and can already see some ways in which it might be useful for teaching; its linguistic orientation is especially interesting for someone, like me, who doesn’t have much background in linguistics, textlinguistics, discourse studies, etc. I do think the back cover of the book may oversell it a little bit: “This concise reference…will supplant the outdated grammars of Allen & Greenough and Hale & Buck.” I haven’t used Hale & Buck, but I often use Allen & Greenough and still find it very helpful (not to mention Gildersleeve & Lodge!). It seems clear to me that the traditional grammars need not be binned at present (their authors, after all, appear to have known a great deal about the Latin language), and in any case there are many respects in which they are not “outdated” (or am I wrong about this?); if they were right about something 100+ years ago, they are still right now, regardless of time of composition. From what I’ve read so far, “supplement” would have been a better word than “supplant.”
There's 3 Comments So Far
September 9th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
Hale & Buck is often my go-to grammar. The U. of Mich. Press seems to be confusing this grammar with a textbook. They talk about it eschewing the “grammar-translation” method, which makes no sense. And from what I’ve seen of it on Google Books it hardly replaces anything.
September 10th, 2010 at 6:07 am
The more I look at Panhuis’s grammar the more it annoys me, partly because of the publisher’s hype, but partly because it tries to do too much and does much of it weakly, and with an air of authority. There’s no pattern to his use of jargon and unnecessary details in one place and his unhelpful brevity and lack of established terms in another.
Here’s a sampling of some random quibbles:
His first rule on syllable length — ‘a syllable bearing a macron on the vowel is long’ — doesn’t say anything at all about Latin grammar, but about editorial convention. His third rule indicates that two consonants make position for the preceding syllable, unless it is marked by ‘the sign for a short syllable,’ but again this is an editorial convention, and one rarely followed. His example is patris, and I would venture to say that every other grammar on the market will tell you why the first syllable is really short here (and will also tell you why it isn’t always so).
Do we need grammars to define ‘context,’ let alone devote whole chapters to it? And does jargon like ‘speech act’ help anyone but a presenter at a boring APA panel? Does the graphic on p. 181 really add anything to the discussion or clarify anything?
Synecdoche, despite what other books say, is not ‘a special case of metonymy.’ One is internal, the other external. Both rely on metaphorical language, but differ fundamentally in how they use metaphor.
And finally, he should have left meter alone. A grammar isn’t the proper place for it, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Dactylic pentameter? Really?
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