The Ingenious Language
Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An Italian journalist pleads her case for learning ancient Greek in modern times.
For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek.
The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history’s greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you’ll have nine reasons to be glad it is.
No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required!
Praise for The Ingenious Language
“Andrea Marcolongo is today’s Montaigne. She possesses an amazing familiarity with the classics combined with the ease and lightness of those who surf the web.” —André Aciman, New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me
“[Marcolongo’s] declaration of love for Ancient Greek does more than celebrate the virtues of its grammar, it shows us modern fools how this language can help us understand ourselves better and live a better life.” —Le Monde (France)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compact but substantive volume, Marcolongo (The Heroic Measure), a journalist who worked as a speechwriter for former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, persuasively argues for tackling the difficult, complicated, and exhilarating task of learning ancient Greek. For her, undertaking it allows for an intellectually rewarding engagement with a language very different from most of those that exist today, and provides direct access to the poetry of such writers as Sappho and Aeschylus ("one of the most intimate and profound uses of the Greek language"). Along the way, Marcolongo rebukes rote and elitist teaching methods that strip Greek of its magic, muses on the art of translation, and theorizes about gender and language, using her own first name (a man's in Italian, and moreover derived from the ancient Greek for "male") as an example. Prior knowledge of the language and how it is taught will intensify one's identification with Marcolongo's experiences, and also help when she lingers in murky grammatical depths perhaps the book's one drawback for a general audience. But anyone who values the study of language will delight in this spirited defense of the effort being worth the reward.
