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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.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge; nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

I read French much better than I speak.

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.