 Several testimonies report Protagoras’ interest on morphological, syntactic, and stylistic issues. Apparently, he was the first to distinguish the gender of nouns (male, female, and neuter) while also proposing many corrections for names in use in his day. Thus he suggested that the female nouns menis (μῆνις, “wrath”, “frenzy”) and pelex (πήληξ, “helmet”), two terms familiar to Homer’s audience, should be regarded as masculine—either on the basis of morphological criteria (because names ending in sigma [ς] or xi [ξ] are usually masculine) or because of their meaning (insofar as war is an eminently masculine pursuit: see 80A27-8 DK). Protagoras also distinguished four verbal modes (indicative, conjunctive, optative, and imperative), which he linked to four types of speech (prayer, question, reply, and command), once again taking the occasion to mention Homer, who had addressed the goddess with a command (“Sing, Goddess, the wrath”) rather than a prayer (80A29 DK). Finally, Diogenes Laertius (IX 52 = 80A1 DK) seems to inform us of Protagoras’ interest in verb tenses (but this is more controversial). All in all, these grammatical reflections presuppose a “rudimentary” (Rademaker 2013: 86) theory of language, which is not limited to names but is rather investigated from the point of view of its underlying structure and connections in relation to the different functions of terms.