12.14: Three favorite words and Greek grammar

christycorr asked about my three favorite words, in any language.

My favorite word in Latin is, and has been since probably the second month I started learning Latin (in, god, 1994), olim. It's a preposition used to introduce stories that means something like "once upon a time." I just have always really liked the sound of it, though thinking about it now, I'm not sure in all my reading I've ever actually encountered it in an actual text. Runner-ups: most of Catullus' vocabulary, and some of the verbs we only know from Pompeiian graffiti.

There are a lot of words I really love in Greek--most of them are nouns, Greek prepositions are not my friend, for reasons we'll get into later--but I think my favorite is still ἡ θάλασσα, thalassa, which means the sea, Homer's wine-dark sea (Homer gets a lot of flack for his color metaphors, but color terms are actually really complicated to translate in general, and the epithet refers to intensity of the color, not the hue itself). It's also the source of the English word thalassocracy, which is a great word in and of itself.

My favorite word in Japanese might be 紫 murasaki, which is the word for purple. It's a noun, which I think is pretty cool--in Japanese some colors are adjectives and some are nouns.

I really love a lot of English words, especially the old weird Anglo-Saxon ones, many of which Twitter has recently been unearthing, such as "dustsceawung," and the one about lying awake in bed at night worrying. Also words like "bumpershoot," which is the best possible word for an umbrella, you must agree. English is pretty cool.

troisroyaumes asked about my favorite aspect of Greek grammar. I should warn you, my opinions on this subject are somewhat unorthodox.

I think the single coolest aspect of classical Attic Greek (which is what they spoke in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, and is the Greek that you will learn at the college level, and is basically the hardest version of Greek to have ever existed in its 3500-odd-year history) is actually one that's so rare that it's never actually taught, just declined in tables in the back of the book for reference: the dual. This is a mode of speech (mostly pronouns, and some verb endings) that two people use when they are extraordinarily close in purpose/intention--it's basically a unified way of saying "we." You mostly see it in drama--the most famous example is probably in The Libation Bearers. Electra and Orestes shift to the dual after they've recognized each other and agreed that Orestes will kill their mother Clytemnaestra for her murder of their father Agamemnon (and Cassandra, but no one cares about her).

Classical Attic Greek is extraordinarily difficult because it's extraordinarily complex, which, although it makes it a pain in the ass to learn, also means that the language is capable of extraordinary precision and subtlety. It's no accident that most philosophers of the ancient world wrote in Greek, because Latin simply doesn't have the structures to express complicated ideas with the same rigor. (You can try, but then you end up like Lucretius, writing an Epicurean epic in dactylic hexameters and causing students of Latin forever after to curse your name and the atoms and the clay mask all at once. I love Lucretius, but De rerum natura is no joke.) Though I shed blood doing flashcards before the exams and beat my head against my books more than once, learning Greek was a really good thing, because I understand grammar much better and also because all other Greek ever is comparatively easy.

My least favorite aspect of Greek grammar is that the old Indo-European instrumental case (which became the ablative in Latin) dropped out a little bit before the Homeric epics were written down (some of the lines preserve old forms including it, as poetry is wont to do), meaning that its functions were absorbed by the genitive, accusative, and dative cases, meaning that it's impossible to commit a stable set of prepositions for each case to memory the way it is in Latin, because they're all all over the place. You don't know what you got til it's gone.