Dionysius Thrax of Alexandria (c. 100 B.C.), or perhaps someone else (it was a long time ago), wrote a grammatical sketch of Greek (a “techn ̄e”) that summarized the linguistic knowledge of his day. This work is the source of an astonishing proportion of modern linguistic vocabulary, including the words syntax, diphthong, clitic, and analogy. Also included are a description of eight parts of speech: noun, verb,parts of speech pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction, participle, and article. Although earlier scholars (including Aristotle as well as the Stoics) had their own lists of parts of speech, it was Thrax’s set of eight that became the basis for descriptions of European languages for the next 2000 years. (All the way to the Schoolhouse Rock educational television shows of our childhood, which had songs about 8 parts of speech, like the late great Bob Dorough’s Conjunction Junction.) The durability of parts of speech through two millennia speaks to their centrality in models of human language.