Il latino come L2 e i nomi greci dell'ablativo

As is well-known, the Latin names of the first five cases were modelled, as loan translations, from Greek terms. By contrast, the name of the “sixth case”, the ablativus, absent in Greek, is an entirely Latin creation. The need for a Greek equivalent of ablativus arose in a very special context, namely in grammatical descriptions of the Latin language composed in Greek. The gram-marian Dositheus represents the only witness of Greek terms for ‘ablative’ : in the Greek interlinear translation of the Latin text of his Ars Grammatica, ablativus is rendered by three different terms, namely ἀφαιρετική, ἀπενεκτική, and ἀποκομιστική (scil. πτῶσις). The investigation of these forms offers interesting insights into the process of loan trans¬lation in the grammatical metalanguage in an unusual direction (from Latin into Greek) and into the practice of teaching Latin as a second language in antiquity.