The volume under review enriches the exceptional series of translations of Priscian's Grammar (See M. Baratin, ‘Où en est la traduction de l’Ars Prisciani?’, in L. Cesalli, F. Goubier, A. Grondeux, A. Robert, L. Valente [edd.], Ad placitum. Pour Irène Rosier-Catach [2021], pp. 71–9). The Ars Prisciani is one of the major works of late antiquity. Written in Constantinople at the beginning of the sixth century ce, it is both a synthesis and an overhaul of ancient Latin grammar, redesigned for a Greek-speaking public. This Ars established itself as one of the main vectors of linguistic thought in the Middle Ages and beyond. With a first volume published in 2010 with an introduction and an annotated and commented translation of Book XVII of Priscian's Grammar (Syntax, part 1), the series continued in 2013 with Books XIV–XVI (preposition, adverb, conjunction), and in 2017 with Book XVIII (Syntax, part 2). The current volume presents Books XI (participle) and XII–XIII (pronoun), and readers now have access to the entire second half of the Ars (participle, pronoun, indeclinable parts of speech, syntax). This monumental work is produced by the group Ars Grammatica, led by Baratin and composed of F. Biville, G. Bonnet, M. Callipo, B. Colombat, A. Garcea, L. Holtz, S. Issaeva, M. Keller, D. Marchand and J. Schneider. In accordance with other volumes in the series, the work includes a long general introduction, the Latin text and its annotated translation into French, a selective bibliography and four indexes (authors, forms and phrases, Latin and Greek grammatical terminology, and grammatical notions).

Written by the top specialists in the field, each introduction to these volumes is a fundamental tool for the history of the parts of speech (cf. B. Colombat and A. Lahaussois [dir.], Histoire des parties du discours [2019]) and grammar, particularly through the place given to the terminological and conceptual transfer from the Greek to the Latin world. One of the great interests of these volumes is that they illustrate the ‘position historique exceptionnelle’ of ancient Latin grammar (p. 7), at the interface between Greek grammar, from which it borrows its entire descriptive system, and all later grammars. We must remember that the phenomenon called ‘Extended Latin Grammar’ was highlighted by S. Auroux in 1992, in the second volume of his Histoire des Idées Linguistiques, and gave rise to a series of pioneering works on the grammatisation of the languages of the world from this Graeco-Latin model – to the point that ‘extended grammars’ are today one of the key concepts of the History of Linguistic Theories research group (HTL – UMR 7597),Footnote ¹ of which Colombat is a member.

The 2020 volume is devoted to the ‘hybrids’, the two parts of speech that Priscian chose to place between the two main constituents of the sentence, namely the noun and the verb on the one hand, and the indeclinable ones on the other. He characterises them by the relations they have with the two main classes: the participle comes from the verb but has case markings, like the noun, while the pronoun replaces the noun but marks person, like the verb. The organisation of the volume is identical to that for other parts of speech (see on pp. 18–19 the plan of the three books): (1) presentation; (2) list of accidents; (3) special points. However, for Book XI, (1) represents a third of the whole, because of the necessity of justifying the place of the participle, while for Book XII, (1) is reduced to two lines before the treatment of accidents; similarly, the course of the participle's accidents takes into account links with the noun and the verb. Another interesting and meaningful chiasmus: the end of Book XI is as brief as the beginning of Book XII, while the end of Book XII is as long as the beginning of Book XI, dealing with complex issues such as the reflexive pronoun sui and the classification of quis/qui under noun or pronoun.

The introduction as well as the annotation open up many historical perspectives, while tracing the positions of Priscian's predecessors, interpreting the tiniest allusions and identifying schools at the origins of these doctrines. Priscian introduced a strong epistemological break by grouping the participle and the pronoun together: whereas Apollonius enumerated the noun, the verb, the participle, the article and the pronoun, Latin grammarians paired noun and pronoun, on the one hand, and verb and participle, on the other. Priscian's chiasmus structure thus introduces a break with a well-established Latin system, a break he justifies at length at the beginning of Book XI: the pronoun and the participle were invented to fill two gaps, the noun having no person marking, the verb lacking case marking: ‘ce statut d'hybrides justifie leur contiguïté, qui n'est donc pas accidentelle, mais assumée et signifiante’ (p. 16). The text of Priscian is highly informative on different conceptions developed by his predecessors, whether this is done explicitly (he mentions the Stoic position of setting the participle under the verb, but argues that this part of speech should be considered as self-standing, as in Books XVII–XVIII) or implicitly, such as when he speaks of participiale uerbum or casuale uerbum, using expressions that respectively model the Stoic metokhikon rhêma and ptôtikon rhêma. In all these passages Priscian takes a stand in ancient debates, and he sometimes happens to be the only author to document positions for which no other trace has been preserved (for instance that of the Stoics, who thought that the article and the pronoun were one part of speech, p. 93 and n. 3).

Evolution may also be seen in the metalinguistic area, where we see ‘comment Priscien procède pour se créer un outil terminologique efficace, surtout dans les domaines de la sémantique et de la syntaxe; où les besoins étaient les plus importants’ (p. 59). The exposition of the participle and the pronoun is indeed peppered with reflections on their construction (transitivity, persons), prefiguring the detailed analyses of Books XVII and XVIII. More broadly, Greek theoretical and metalinguistic sources, Latin antecedents, but also Scaliger's a posteriori enlightenment are explored in detail. The Greek tradition is therefore omnipresent in three ways: in Priscian's text, in the annotation that explains the slightest allusion and in the introduction that draws up an exhaustive panorama of the correspondences between the Greek base and its treatment by Priscian.

The work of the Ars Grammatica Group is distinguished by a translation that is both precise and elegant, which never hides the difficulties found in the text, by a rich and precise annotation that deciphers the epistemological background of Priscian, but also by the extreme care given to the ratio edendi with regard to the differences with M. Hertz's text (section 9 of the introduction, pp. 83–5) and divergences concerning the punctuation or the choice to keep passages as authentic. We therefore hope to see the translation of Book VIII, which opens the section devoted to the verb, as soon as possible.