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    The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek
    The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek
    The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek
    Ebook201 pages3 hours

    The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek

    By Andrea Marcolongo and Will Schutt

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781609455460
    The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek
    Author

    Andrea Marcolongo

    Andrea Marcolongo is an Italian journalist, writer, Classics scholar, and former speech writer for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. The Ingenious Language (Europa, 2019) was a bestseller in Italy and in many of the other dozen countries in which it has been published. She is also the author of Starting from Scratch: The Life-Changing Lessons of Aeneas (Europa, 2022). She lives in Paris, France.

    Read more from Andrea Marcolongo

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    • 4/5
      I was Greek major in college, so I was excited to hear about this book. It's a bit uneven, some of which may be because it was written in Italian and translated into English. Some of the prose in jaunty and doesn't always make perfect sense. Because she often compares Greek to Italian, which is different from English, her discussion of verb aspect with the aorist gets very muddled, I believe because Italian does not have a present progressive the way English does. The same with the optative mood; she could have gone into the different uses of "may", "might", "would", "should", "can" and "could" in English to explain the mood to us, but nothing. The discussion of gender is also a bit flat, as native English speakers often don't understand what it is, whereas Italians have a different experience with it. But the author has a quirky style and a lot of personality combined with very deep knowledge and passion, plus an understanding that the Greek bug does not bite the vast majority of people who are forced to take it in high school or college. While I didn't completely understand her explanations of the aorist or the optative, I learned some things that my professors never tried to explain, not to mention her useful histories of the dialects, including Koine and how it meant the death of Greek in many ways despite its traveling very far and wide. I wish I knew of a book written in English that expounded many of these things and had such a playful attitude at the same time- it would be a great thing to give to young students (and maybe there is such a book in English, but I've never heard of it). It was a quick read, however, so if you love Greek (or Latin), I recommend it. If you don't know Greek or other inflected languages, then you might find it very confusing (did I just use an optative?).
    • 4/5
      Classics professor Marcolongo waxes enthusiastic about ancient Greek as a language, how it works, what's cool about it, how it differs from other languages. Reading this was by turns fascinating and a slog. Some of it went completely over my head (aspect) while some of it made me go "Neat!" (the dual). Some of it was hard to follow for someone not familiar with the Greek alphabet (any discussion of how stems change, for instance--I could follow that about a language that uses our alphabet, because at least I'd some sense of what I'm looking at), and some of it I think was lost in translation (the book was translated from Italian). Oh well. At least I learned a couple of things I didn't know before.

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    The Ingenious Language - Andrea Marcolongo

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