Latin Grammars

Jesse

Over at r/latin on Reddit, someone asked for recommendations of more “advanced” Latin grammars. Partly for my own future reference, here’s the list that I suggested. I hope it may be helpful to anyone looking for such a list who may stumble upon it here.

One-volume Reference Grammars

In my experience, the most comprehensive of the standard one-volume grammars in English is the following:

But its terminology is somewhat different from contemporary standards, and, depending on the problem, I may still need to “triangulate” between it and other standard grammars, including the following:

More advanced grammars of Classical Latin

When a one-volume reference grammar isn’t enough, I often turn to the following two classics:

Also extremely useful are the (very fat!) textbooks that have made available to the world the teaching approach of the late Fr. Reginald Foster, especially because the index to the second volume helpfully cross-references the grammatical constructions that are taught in volume 1 to real-life examples from the letters of Cicero in volume 2:

Two options offering a more historical/linguistic approach are the following:

  • James Clackston (ed.), A Companion to the Latin Language (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
  • Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin (Ann Arbor, MI: Beech Stave Press, 2009; 2nd edn 2020).

I have not personally made use (yet) of the following, to which I have online access through my university but which seems prohibitively expensive to buy (probably because each volume is over 1400 pages long):

  • Harm Pinkster, The Oxford Latin Syntax, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015–2021).
    • vol. 1 (2015): The Simple Clause.
    • vol. 2 (2021): The Complex Sentence and Discourse.

The Heavies

For really heavy grammatical study, however, no one can beat the Germans, to whom we owe the following multi-volume reference works in the series Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft [“Handbook of Studies in Antiquity”], one for Classical Latin and one for Medieval Latin:

Classical

Manu Leumann, J. B. Hofmann, and Anton Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik auf der Grundlage des Werkes von Friedrich Stolz und Joseph Hermann Schmalz [“Latin Grammar, Based on the Work of Friedrich Stolz and Joseph Hermann Schmalz”], new edn, 3 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1972–79):

Medieval

Peter Stotz, Handbuch der lateinischen Sprache des Mittelalters, 5 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.5 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996–2004). All five volumes accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/2.5.5.-p.-stotz-bibliographie-quellenbersicht-und-register-2004/

  • vol. 1 (2002): Einleitung: Lexikologische Praxis; Wörter und Sachen; Lehnwortgut. [“Introduction: Lexicographical Practice; ‘Words and Things’ (a technical term for a trend in twentieth-century philology); Loanwords”]
  • vol. 2 (2000): Bedeutungswandel und Wortbildung. [“Change in Meaning and Word-Formation”]
  • vol. 3 (1996): Lautlehre. [“Morphology”]
  • vol. 4 (1998): Formenlehre, Syntax und Stilistik. [“Accidence, Syntax, and Style”]
  • vol. 5 (2004): Bibliographie, Quellenübersicht und Register. [“Bibliography, Overview of Sources, and Index”]

Latin Grammars Written in Latin

As for grammars of Latin written in Latin, apart from a few specimens at the introductory level, the ones that I’m aware of were written in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period: