Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.
The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.
I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.
From that moment, I did not cease to pray to God that by his grace it might one day be permitted to me to learn Greek.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
For my part, it was Greek to me.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.