The chapter on case begins, “Inflected, from the Latin flectere, ‘to bend or curve.’ Meaning ‘to change direction.’. In “Cases, or an Orderly Anarchy of Words,” Marcolongo writes eloquently, “Capable of indicating the exact function of words without ambiguities, the ancient Greek case system makes for a formidable spectacle: word order doesn’t follow a logical pattern but an expressive and, therefore, personal pattern.” Marcolongo loves etymology and often uses it to approach and elucidate a subject. Besides aspect, they include gender, number (Greek famously has not just the singular and plural but also the dual, for things that come in pairs, such as twins or lovers), mood, and diacritical marks (Greek words tend to come front-loaded with flecks over their vowels). The nine reasons make for a spread worthy of a symposium. “All it is is a writing system for getting the sounds of words down on the page.” Yet she acknowledges that “the alphabet barrier” seems “to cloud our view of resemblances between Greek and our own language.” “The alphabet is a means of communicating a language, not the language,” she writes. She provides translations, of course, but insists that “it does not matter if you know ancient Greek or not.” In fact, if you don’t, “all the better”-you can still play with her at “thinking in ancient Greek.” A subject that I devoted the whole first chapter of my book to-the alphabet-Marcolongo dispenses with in less than a paragraph, in the penultimate essay. From the first chapter (though they are not really chapters but essays that can be read in any order), Marcolongo serves up healthy portions of Plato in raw Greek, without apology. One of the things I most admire about “The Ingenious Language” is that it doesn’t spoon-feed the reader. The word “epic” in the subtitle may have been intended to clarify that we’re talking ancient Greek here, the language of epic poetry, and also to convey the excitement of the contemporary usage, as in, say, “an epic boxing match.” The Italian title, “La Lingua Geniale,” may have been inspired by “ L’Amica Geniale,” the blockbuster novel by Elena Ferrante, translated into English by Ann Goldstein as “ My Brilliant Friend” (also published by Europa). The book stayed in my luggage-it went to Texas, Auckland, Abu Dhabi, and Cambridge, England, and crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, where I was sure I would get to it-and at last, three years later, it has been translated into English, by Will Schutt, as “ The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek” (Europa Compass). Still, Marcolongo, a journalist who grew up in Livorno, Italy, and has a degree in classics, did something I had very much wanted to do: she wrote about classical Greek while she was young and freshly enamored of the beauty, economy, and subtlety of the language and passionate about how it can change your life. I had made it to page 10 of the first essay, on aspect-a property of verbs by which the ancient Greeks distinguished between the “how” and the “when” of an action-when I got distracted by a sidebar on Greek wine and decided that I really ought to get out more: take a walk in the Old Town, with its streets named after Socrates and Plato, and check to see if that bar called Beer Paradise had opened for the season. I was writing a book on Greek myself, and the difficulty of Greek made Italian seem transparent in comparison. I had brought the book with me to the island of Rhodes because I thought it would be good practice in both Italian and Greek. Slowly, at a very low level, without full comprehension, I should have said. I flashed it at a meeting with some highly accomplished multilingual women. If it's in the middle of a word, you would use "σ".When Andrea Marcolongo’s book “ La Lingua Geniale,” subtitled “9 ragioni per amare il greco” (“Nine Reasons to Love Greek”), came out in 2016, I bought it, in Italian, and took it with me to Greece.
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