The French aorist in sixteenth-century grammar, or how to make the best of a bad Greek concept

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that sixteenth-century French grammarians subtly adapted the Greek concept of aorist to their native language in order to fill a gap left by past tense descriptions in Latin grammar. In this French aorist concept, they amalgamated features today associated with tense and aspect. I start out by recalling the origin of the aorist concept in Greek antiquity, Byzantium, and the Italian Renaissance. Then I look at French grammarians’ dealings with their past tense system, and especially how they inserted the aorist into it. I focus on the French grammatical tradition up to Henri Estienne’s well-known Traicté de la conformité du language françois auec le grec (1565). My main conclusion is that French grammarians made the best of a bad Greek concept, primarily out of a descriptive need, and only secondarily in order to give a Hellenic aura to French, even though the latter was fashionable in sixteenth-century France. As such, these grammarians developed a new language-particular concept rather than merely transposing the Greek concept to the French context.