[1] The roots of traditional grammar are in the work of classical Greek and Latin philologists.
The Indian grammarian Pāṇini wrote the Aṣṭādhyāyī, a descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, sometime between the 4th and the 2nd century BCE.
Descriptive grammars were rarely used in Classical Greece or in Latin through the Medieval period.
[10] During the Renaissance, Latin and Classical Greek were broadly studied along with the literature and philosophy written in those languages.
[11] With the invention of the printing press and the use of Vulgate Latin as a lingua franca throughout Europe, the study of grammar became part of language teaching and learning.
[10] Although complete grammars were rare, Ancient Greek philologists and Latin teachers of rhetoric produced some descriptions of the structure of language.
[12] The descriptions produced by classical grammarians (teachers of philology and rhetoric) provided a model for traditional grammars in Europe.
According to linguist William Harris, "Just as the Renaissance confirmed Greco-Roman tastes in poetry, rhetoric and architecture, it established ancient Grammar, especially that which the Roman school-grammarians had developed by the 4th [century CE], as an inviolate system of logical expression.
[13] Mastering grammar rules like those derived from the study of Latin has at times been a specific goal of English-language education.
[12] Although systems vary somewhat, typically traditional grammars name eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
[16][17] These groupings are based on categories of function and meaning in Latin and other Indo-European languages.
[18] The traditional definitions of parts of speech refer to the role that a word plays in a sentence, its meaning, or both.
[17] Contemporary linguists argue that classification based on a mixture of morphosyntactic function and semantic meaning is insufficient for systematic analysis of grammar.
[22] Some words feature irregular inflection, not taking an affix or following a regular pattern of sound change.
A verb also has mood, indicating whether the sentence describes reality or expresses a command, a hypothesis, a hope, etc.
The following tables present partial conjugation of the Latin verb esse and its English equivalent, be.
[22] This partial table includes only two tenses (present and preterite) and one mood (indicative) in addition to the infinitive.
[26] In traditional grammar syntax, a sentence is analyzed as having two parts, a subject and a predicate.