I looked into it a little and the Greek word rhema that the Romans translated as verbum originally seems to have been used simply to mean predicate, something you say about something else, in contrast with onoma, which while literally “name” seems to refer gramatically to the subject. This lines up well with your characterization of Croft’s proposal, and with Aristotelian logic.
Around 100 BC, in his book Art of Grammar, Dionysius Thrax seems to have redefined rhema to mean something more like the modern colloquial sense of “verb”: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person, and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone. This is the distinction the Roman grammarians inherited, and defines the semantic context in which Spinoza is writing.
This probably needs to be edited in somewhere as it’s an important link in the chain.
I looked into it a little and the Greek word rhema that the Romans translated as verbum originally seems to have been used simply to mean predicate, something you say about something else, in contrast with onoma, which while literally “name” seems to refer gramatically to the subject. This lines up well with your characterization of Croft’s proposal, and with Aristotelian logic.
Around 100 BC, in his book Art of Grammar, Dionysius Thrax seems to have redefined rhema to mean something more like the modern colloquial sense of “verb”: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person, and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone. This is the distinction the Roman grammarians inherited, and defines the semantic context in which Spinoza is writing.
This probably needs to be edited in somewhere as it’s an important link in the chain.