Emily Boulby (St Mary's Menston) reviews Andrea Marcolongo's 'The Ingenious Language'

The Ingenious Language offers a deep insight into just how complex yet beautiful the Greek language is; In her book she offers a great insight into the Greek way of living whilst making a complex language, that only the few understand into a fun journey where she explores how the Greek breathed their words, how the words were accented and more importantly how they sounded. Even though the Greek language at first looks too complex to be understood, she manages to guide you through the language in a way where you slowly begin to understand it. Her own experience of Greek allows the reader to almost pick up her passion for the language, and her stories about how Greek has been manipulated and changed over the many centuries by the Proto-Indo- Europeans and the Byzantines allows for a rich understanding about such an unknown language.

The book, whilst teaching you about the language aspect of Greek, includes snippets of knowledge such as the explanation of Greek poetry, where the Greeks would either write poetry in a monodic format or a choral format, however these snippets aren’t just about facts about the Greeks they also include her own personal experience with the language, in one of these factual snippets she talks about her Greek textbook and how her relationship with it slowly evolved from being one of hate to one of a deep appreciation that she only found once she understood how beautifully complex the language is, her own experience with Greek and how she learned to love it offers the reader a sense of hope that to learn the language you don’t need all the word stems and operatives to be constantly revised, you first need an understanding of the Greeks before their language can be fully appreciated.

Something I agreed with in the book was…

I especially liked/agreed with her passion for the language, you can tell through the book that she has a genuine passion for Greek and is genuinely upset at the fact that the Greek pronunciation of their words will never be known, I also particularly liked how she she gives examples of Greek scholars and their ideas, like Plato and the sorb apple, this helped me get an insight not just as to how the Greeks spoke, but it also helped me gain a better understanding of their ideas about the world and the people within it.

Something I disagreed with in this book was…

The one thing I disliked about the book was that there wasn’t a lot of Greek mythology with the language aspect of the book, I would have liked to have known more about how the language fitted in with their mythology and philosophy.

Something I learnt from reading this book that I didn't know about this subject before was...

In the Greek language there are three genders, there is male and the female, things ‘with soul’ and there’s also neuter, the neuter refers to mainly inanimate objects that are ‘without soul’, I also learnt that the Greeks used a different form of punctuation, the particle, these connect the sentences and keeps the argument flowing from one point to the other.