You Should Study Ancient Greek.
Of course, maybe you did at school and went on to Greats at Oxford. Or perhaps you hated the subject and have never touched your texts again. If so, we will get back to you.
The rest of us might seriously consider the project as it's a language that is hard to study and extremely hard to learn. How hard? Let's calibrate using one of the simplest parts of speech, the definite article. Latin has none; it simply relies on context; English has one, of course; French has four: le, la, l’, and les. Ancient Greek has twenty-four.
That's correct, twenty-four. For one English ‘the’, there are 24 possibilities in classical Greek depending on gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), number (one or many *), and role in the sentence (such as subject, object or possessive). In addition, each word is not particularly memorable for a brain tuned to the sights and sounds of the Roman alphabet.
Why bother with hard? We have long known that demanding of our heart and loading our muscles strengthens them. Dancing beyond our earliest dating years stops us from tumbling. And we are now realising that pushing and pulling our synaptic pathways gives them flexibility and longevity. The best medical thinking suggests that we cannot reverse dementia once it has arrived, but maybe, just maybe, we can stall it.
So, commence with the beautiful alphabet. If you did science or maths, you'll already know many letters, such as the adorable pi, π, famous for helping with the area of-well-circular pies. Learn your nouns, which take forms depending on their role in the sentence, and you'll stumble across friends such as Δημοκρατία (Dēmokratía) from dēmos (people) plus kratos (power). Χάος (Kháos) gives us chaos, which was the vast, empty void before creation in Greek mythology. You'll love that hippopotamus is from ἱπποπόταμος (hippopótamos), a compound of ἵππος (hippos) – meaning horse and ποταμός (potamos) – meaning river.
Add verbs, and you'll be able to attempt your first translations from Greek and exult in the tremendous wow and fist pump of a successful translation from English into Greek, however simple it may be. Keep pushing, and don't be deterred: the elegant sandwich construction, descriptive and attributive adjectives, the rabbit holes of the aorist tense. The magic of the ubiquitous and powerful participle, here, there and everywhere.
Your memory will strengthen, your problem-solving sharpen, your focus deepen, and your cognition become more flexible. You will handle complex abstractions and review the works of the greatest thinkers, such as Plato in philosophy, Hippocrates in science, and Homer in literature. And you will love becoming a detective as you slowly-oh, so slowly-unravel sentences, perhaps about the Cyclops.
How far have I travelled on my odyssey? Oh, not far at all, about GCSE level. Translations from and into Greek. Comprehensions and, of course, set texts. But the pleasures of spending time in an analogue world where it is just you, words and pen and paper are profound.
And if you did it all years ago? Revise and re-boot! Does Latin count? Of course. While Latin offers similar benefits, Greek's particularly complex syntax, multiple moods, and participial constructions coupled with a whole new alphabet provide a more significant challenge, making it even more mentally stimulating.
Been there and done that? Are both languages simply too easy? Then try Hebrew (which builds most of its words from three-letter roots, allowing a system both economical and poetic) or Old English (where the verbs are strong or weak; the former create their past tense by vowel change, while weak verbs add a dental suffix (-d or -t). Much survives in Modern English with irregular verbs like sing/sang/sung, relics of the strong verb system.) or Sanskrit (where the endings and beginnings of words change when combined in a sentence for phonetic smoothness. This allows an incredibly fluid and musical sound when spoken, but it certainly makes it more complex to learn and parse!or Old Irish (which uses a verb-subject-object word order, which is unusual among Indo-European languages, giving Old Irish a distinctive rhythm and poetic feel).
And a guide to Ancient Greek to start? John Taylor is your man with a well-structured introductory text based on many hard-won years of school teaching. Try also Coulter H George's How Dead Languages Work for a profound and philosophical view on such languages.
Go study a hard language and protect that brain.
"Χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά." (Chalepá tà kalá.) – "Beautiful things are difficult", Plato
*Experts in the language will note I ignore the dual form for simplicity.
…………………………………………………………..
Nicholas Bate is a speaker, a writer and a consultant.
He is the author of Bram, A Spy Story, The Molly Trilogy (Meet Molly/Molly and The Isle of Kasta/Molly &Ben), Pierre Lambert, Detective, and Love, Life & Legacy, a collection of short stories.
