Review: The Ingenious Language by Andrea Marcolongo (2019)

‘Tense and aspect. Name a more iconic duo.’

This piece of Twitter bait was posted last week by an American linguist, and you can just imagine the spread of responses.

Protasis and apodosis?

Mood and modality?

Gin and tonic?

Simon and Garfunkel?

The usual wags soon piled in (‘Tense and lax?’) and the more earnest historical linguists beat a hasty retreat.

Perhaps one of those linguists went off and curled up with a good book – say, The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek by Italian journalist and Classics grad Andrea Marcolongo (below).

Here is a work short and accessible which extols the idiosyncrasies of Classical Greek and its impact on the world.

And about time too! I hear you cry.

You don’t have to search hard in the Classics section of your local Waterstones to find ‘impact and afterlife’ accounts of Greek culture or history – think Oliver Taplin’s Greek Fire (1990) or Charlotte Higgins’ It’s All Greek To Me (2008). But the language half of that iconic duo – lit and lang – rarely gets the same sort of popular treatment.

Publishers have clearly spotted an opportunity and last year three books came out ready for the fight, ‘tooled up’ with classroom anecdotes and Victorian jargon.

First was Mary Norris’ Greek To Me, published in April. Next came Marcolongo’s 205-page explanifesto, a translation of the Italian original, a 2016 bestseller on the continent. Lastly, in November, came Nicola Gardini’s Long Live Latin (soon to be reviewed here), the only one penned by a professional Classicist.

This trend is really encouraging.

The value of classical languages is too often hitched to the cultural products they communicate. ‘Learn Latin and unlock the beauty of Ovid et al.’ This is a fair argument – I make it all the time – but it can play down the beauty of the languages themselves.

If pupils are going to study Latin or Greek for only two or three years, surely we should emphasise the intrinsic attractions of learning these languages, before holding up the prize of reading Tacitus or Livy in the original?

The book’s blurb appeal, then, is clear. Does it prosecute on the page though?

What I liked

Each chapter constitutes one of Marcolongo’s nine reasons for loving Greek. Each is well selected, and each functions nicely as a standalone essay on an aspect of the language – something you could photocopy for a class, for instance.

The softcore chapters on how to translate Greek or the relationship between ‘Greek and Us’ offset nicely the hardcore material on breathings, or the dual.

The explanations of linguistic features are conversational and successfully root every point in a fun example from English – which is, of course, where many a school language lesson begins. It never feels school-y, though, and that’s an accomplishment.

In fact, Marcolongo makes frequent reference to her own experience in the liceo classico system both in the main body but also in various ‘sidebars’ dotted across the chapters, which digress on an interesting feature of Greek culture or language. There’s a touching tribute to her school textbook, Grammata, on page 89 for instance: ‘Lastly, the plain heavy paper of Grammata is beautiful and now bears the scent of thoughts returned to a thousand times.’ She must have been reading Catullus over her cornflakes that morning.

From a Classics teacher’s perspective, her efforts to conceptualise Greek idiom can be quite illuminating. The chapter on aspect, for example, examines three vital questions that Greek courses often neglect:

1. Is the aorist more about tense or aspect?
2. What is ‘indefinite’ (aoristos) about the aorist?
3. Why do some verbs not have certain principal parts?

This chapter also addresses the expectations we bring to learning Greek, and in particular the shadow cast by Latin.

The relation between Latin and Greek is a sibling one, rather than – as the Romans thought – a parent and child (Latin) one. Yet Latin exerts a stronger influence on contemporary Europe through its Romance legacy. The simplifying force of Latin – dropping the optative, rolling the Greek aorist into the perfect – makes Greek conceptually more alien to us.

As Marcolongo puts it, ‘this grammatical category [aspect], this way of evaluating the quality of events and their consequences rather than by nailing events to the wall like wedding pictures in a present-past-future schema; in short, this question of how in ancient Greek has been lost to us forever.’

Any reservations?

There are one or two slight wrong footings that did catch my eye. On a couple of occasions, for instance, she identifies the infinitive and the participle as moods. And I’m not sure that ‘translate’ derives from the Latin traduco…

I also found a little wearing two features of Marcolongo’s style. First was the commitment to preface every chapter with a high-flown quote from a famous poet: at best gratuitous, at worst pretentious. The Italian ones especially, veiled by translation, mostly made me cringe. Why, for example, did she decide to begin an essay on grammatical gender with the following?

And we are the shore

but always this side of that island

where one says ‘I’ to say

– to be – ‘we.’

The humour is also hit-and-miss and that’s one reason I had to read this book in short bursts. She sets out how the language works – case system, mood etc. – in quite a clear way. She is a learned and lively tutor. But this exposition is often interrupted with attempts at irony, wry comments on modern life, or quips about ‘those ancients’. It reminded me of a teacher I had at school who was fantastic – knowledgeable, articulate, impassioned – but fancied himself a little funnier than he was.

This might sound harsh and of course questions of taste and humour are highly personal. But for me it was a barrier to enjoyment and, regardless of what you find funny, the sheer frequency of these asides does break the fluency of the core content which, especially for a non-classicist, is conceptual and sophisticated.

All that said, I would recommend this book to the school librarian without question. If nothing else, it will stimulate awareness in pupils of the poignant fact that, in Marcolongo’s words, ‘Every language puts forward a particular vision of reality.’

Thanks for reading!

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