Some universities have announced that spelling and grammar (i.e. morphology and syntax) are not all that important, but quality of thought is. Up to a point, Lord Copper.
Ancient Greeks were fascinated by language and invented much of the terminology in which we still talk about it. Protagoras (5th century bc) first classified nouns as masculine, feminine and ‘things’ (neuter). Aristotle (4th c. bc) defined articles, nouns, conjunctions and verbs, and talked of vowels, consonants, syllables and inflections as well as groups of words producing a collective meaning (‘utterance’), noting that ‘there can be utterance without verbs’. Dionysius from Thrace (2nd c. bc) divided nouns into cases (nominative, vocative, etc.), and singular and plural.
They also argued intensely about words and word-formation. Apollonius ‘Duskolos’ (‘Grouch’, 2nd c. ad) pointed out that traditional orthography demonstrated that there were historical reasons behind word-formation and spelling.
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