Speaking correctly

Abstract

This chapter discusses correct speech. The criteria for correctness were as Quintilian had described them: in particular those of, in Latin, ratio or regularity and of usage. They could conflict; and that of regularity attracted the ridicule of Sextus Empiricus. One concept of ‘correct Greek’ lay, as he put it, in respect for usage, which could be determined by observation of ordinary conversation. Another, however, was dissociated from ‘the usage common to us’ and appeared to proceed ‘according to grammatical analogy’. The chapter then looks at the types of error in utterances. A ‘barbarism’ was a single part of an utterance that was ‘in error in ordinary discourse’. A different ‘vice’, however, arises from ‘the weaving together of parts of an utterance contrary to a rule of grammar’. This was called a soloecismus: in English, that is, a ‘solecism’.