Let's take a look at the Greeks

Many books on ancient Greek are full of conjugation tables and declensions. Few attempt to help us understand the nuances of this language, and most forget to let us feel its beauty or the play of rhythms and sounds it allows.

Jacqueline de Romilly, Monique Trédé and, more recently, Andrea Marcolongo have tried to introduce Greek to those who have not learned it, through the vision of the world it conveys and the authors who reveal its beauty.

"It is the exceptional qualities of this language that will be discussed here, not to teach its forms and rules, but to express its beauties".
(Jacqueline de Romilly and Monique Trédé, Petites leçons sur le grec ancien, Éditions Stock - 2008)

Andrea Marcolongo published La langue géniale in its French edition in 2018. She brings a joyful enthusiasm and passion, without forced erudition or pedantry. She communicates a desire to discover this language and blends her explanations with her own story. Her book has been a success in several countries. Her appearances in bookshops and on literary broadcasts attract many readers and demonstrate a real interest in the language. Andrea Marcolongo's undeniable talent as a storyteller is a major contributor to this. So does her emotional bond with the language. In fact, the publisher describes her book as a "declaration of love".

Just as other enthusiasts have inspired us to discover astrophysics, mathematics, biology or prehistory, the author awakens our desire for a change of scenery in space and time, through a language that is said to be dead!

La langue géniale is based on the often well-founded hypothesis that grammar, conjugations and declensions are not very attractive for a first relationship with a language... How many people have died of boredom and discouragement when faced with classic textbooks?

On the contrary, the author suggests we shake up our frames of reference and discover nuances (a word she quotes in French) that encourage us to think differently.

The finer points of meaning

According to Andrea Marcolongo, the Greeks didn't use the same categories to think about the world as we do. For example, the future tense was rarely used. The Greeks had little interest in time, but emphasized the sequence of causes and consequences. They attached little importance to the "when" question, and concentrated on the "how". "Greek emphasized the process of the action and the speaker's feeling about it," she says in an interview with Télérama magazine. So the aspect of the verb tells us whether we're evoking the beginning of the action, its unfolding, or its completion.

Andrea Marcolongo gives other examples of the specific features of the Greek language.

The dual, which is neither singular nor plural, also forces us to think outside the box. It can refer to a couple, two friends or two enemies.

The optative is a mode that distinguishes between desires that are achievable and those that would be impossible to realize. It's an intimate mode, introducing subjectivity into the language by situating the author of the sentence in relation to what he or she would like. Rough translations would be "comme j'aimerais que" or "Ah si je pouvais...".

A change of scenery in time and space

Language is the foundation of our relationship with the world. It orients, it makes visible, it brings out nuances, blurs others, it shapes without enclosing, all the more so as it reinvents itself at every moment.

"A language is not entirely responsible for the works inscribed within it. But it is not foreign to them. Without being the direct cause of what is said in its syntax, vocabulary or singular forms, it configures a contribution to the world, a space for thought and sensibility. "says Roger-Paul Droit, who was also seduced by the genial language.

Nevertheless, learning Greek reenchants our world, making the familiar seem strange. Discovering nuances is the first step towards expressing ourselves with greater finesse. Learning ancient languages is not only fun, it's also useful training in syntactic construction, argumentation and text structuring.

Learning rigor

Andréa Marcolongo also affirms her taste for working with and analyzing texts. She fights against a mechanistic approach to teaching, which is not concerned with the pleasure students derive from discovering texts.

It's impossible not to draw a parallel with Jacqueline de Romilly. This author, a member of the Académie française, has written several books devoted to the Greek language, its beauty and nuances, without drowning us in conjugation tables.

In Petites leçons sur le grec ancien, published in 2008, Jacqueline de Romilly and Monique Trédé already evoked the relationship with time, so different from our own, insisting on the use of the perfect tense, which indicates that an action is coming to an end. The authors remind us that word order is of little importance, because of declensions. This grammatical peculiarity saves words and creates stylistic effects... but is a headache for translators. In this book, we discover the choices a translator has to make with every sentence and paragraph.

The authors are also enthusiastic about the "middle" mode, situated between the active and passive, which expresses the subject's commitment to the action. They show us how all the little words γαρ, καί give rhythm to a text, and bring variations of meaning that we struggle to translate. Carried by a limpid style, numerous examples and a genuine reflection on translation, this is a short, dense book, but accessible to anyone with no knowledge of the language.

Just a few years apart, these authors show us the power of the emotional bond in learning. Learning Greek, like learning anything else, is first and foremost an experience, an encounter with a system of thought, authors and teachers. That's where the desire to delve into grammars and dictionaries comes from.

In 2008, Andrea Marcolongo's success was mainly due to a few literary broadcasts and columns, but now he is also building his success on social networks and videos of his appearances.

Illustrations : Frédéric Duriez

Sources

Andrea Marcolongo: La langue géniale : 9 bonnes raisons d'aimer le grec translation Béatrice Robert-Boissier - Les belles lettres - 2018
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/la-langue-geniale-9782253257646.html

Jacqueline de Romilly, Monique Trédé- Petites leçons sur le grec ancien, Stock, October 2008
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/petites-lecons-sur-le-grec-ancien-9782253129127.html

Roger-Paul Droit "Philo veut dire "j'aime" posted February 15, 2018, accessed September 30, 2018
http://rpdroit.com/2018/02/15/philo-veut-dire-jaime