Ingenious Language, The: A Love Affair with Greek in Nine Chapters

- Blurb -

Nine reasons to love Greek. Nine ways the language of Sappho and Thucydides is thrillingly relevant to our lives today. Nine takes on the idea that what can be said in Greek cannot be said in any other language. Nine hints about how Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you. Nine chapters in which to discover a new passion for a very old language. This book is a love song to the language of human history's greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. "Greek has been," writes author Andrea Marcolongo, "the longest and most beautiful romance of my life." Whether readers remember a little Greek from college, are bona fide Greek scholars, or know not a word of the language, they will find Marcolongo's boundless enthusiasm for her subject utterly infectious. This book comes with no pop quizzes or finals. Rather, in Marcolongo's buoyant prose, it tells the story of a sublime language that is not only unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity but also offers us a way seeing the world and our place in it in new ways. Marcolongo's takes readers on an astonishing journey into a language that does such extraordinary things as rewarding desire with its own modal verb; prioritizing mindfulness and dynamic presence in the fabric of its grammar; bequeathing unions like that of lovers a special case that is neither singular nor plural but something more, something beyond such reductive binary definitions. It may be Greek to you, but in Marcolongo's international bestselling book you'll discover nine reasons to feel happy it is.