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ABSTRACT
This paper uses the Greeks' understanding of the optative mood over many centuries to enlarge our knowledge of the origins of formal grammar, of the vernacular Greek language in post-classical times, and of the limitations which imitative Atticism faced when it tried to give new life to a verbal form which had virtually disappeared from the spoken language. Starting with the very beginnings of grammar as a discipline, it argues that Protagoras' contribution to the study of verbal mood has been overlooked, and the Stoics given too much credit. This observation has implications for the larger issue of whether the origin of formal grammar is to be found amongst students of literature or of philosophy. The rest of the paper works through the standard uses of the optative found in Attic and Homeric Greek, examining the explanations and paraphrases of these usages found in ancient and medieval grammarians and scholiasts, and arguing that this material confirms the evidence for the vernacular suggested by the New Testament and papyri, and can also explain some non-classical uses of the optative found in Atticising writers.
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1. INTRODUCTION: GREEK GRAMMAR AND THE VERNACULAR
The study of Greek moods cannot be said to have been neglected over recent decades, and indeed by its modest standards may even be enjoying a boom. But the new impetus for this work has without doubt been modern linguistics, an enterprise driven largely by modern theory and cross-linguistic comparisons. Recent work on the Greek moods largely ignores the ancient grammatical tradition. Emblematic perhaps is Willmott's 2007 study of the moods of Homeric Greek: for her, 'traditional theory' means scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the book contains barely a mention of the many centuries of ancient scholarship and its practitioners who not only wrote and spoke Greek, but who invented and developed the concept of grammar and strove to understand the optative mood.1
This attempt to understand the optative mood was particularly challenging to Greek grammarians inasmuch as, for most of the history of grammar as a formal discipline, the mood was barely present in the normal spoken language of the time. Of course, by definition the 'spoken language' is gone for good, but scholars...