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Ancient and modern

Varro on The Apprentice

31 August 2013

9:00 AM

31 August 2013

9:00 AM

Budding businesswoman Luisa Zissman, with her A in A-level English, has enquired whether ‘Bakers Toolkit’ or ‘Baker’s Toolkit’ is correct. As usual, the ancients are to blame.

Ancient Greeks were fascinated by language and invented much of the terminology in which we still talk about it: parts of speech, e.g. nouns (which included adjectives), pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions; case, number, gender, tense, voice, mood and so on — all words translated by Romans from the Greek into Latin.

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