I had melancholy thoughts . . .
A strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude
I have consulted dozens of texts in order to put down in black and white my insights, hang-ups, feelings, and stubbornly held opinions concerning the Greek language, which I have cultivated over fifteen years of vigorous debate and heated discussions between me, myself, and I.
Even today, the book done, I still don’t have any answer: most of the works that I scrutinized take great pains to reiterate more or less the same things that have been repeated in libraries and university classrooms for centuries. The essays definitely confirmed what I already knew, but they didn’t tell me much about what I didn’t.
Maybe “the strangeness in my mind” really is to blame, or my special sixth sense for Greek: the fact is, today I think in ancient Greek.
Just as Professor Emeritus Maria Grazia Ciani taught me to, I take full responsibility for what I have written in this book. Where I have erred, omitted, misunderstood, or made up, I apologize—starting now.
Most of the texts that contributed to the writing of this book were actually about life, not Greek. Sometimes they weren’t even books but music, places, paintings, human beings.
As for specialist knowledge, here is a list of the texts I consulted:
Aloni, Antonio, ed. La lingua dei Greci. Rome: Carocci, 2011.
Campanile, Enrico, Bernard Comrie, and Calvert Watkins, eds. Introduzione alla lingua e alla cultura degli Indoeuropei. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010.
Chantraine, Pierre. Morphologie historique du grec. Paris: Klincksieck, 1947.
Dimou, Nikous. On the Unhappiness of Being Greek. Translated by David Connolly. Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2012.
Fanciullo, Franco. Introduzione alla linguistica storica. Bologna: il Mulino, 2011.
Heilmann, Luigi. Grammatica storica della lingua greca. Turin: Sei, 1963.
Hoffmann, Otto, Albert Debrunner, and Anton Scherer. Geschichte der griechischen Sprache. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969.
Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney, J.A. Beach, Oliver Berghorf, W.J. Lewis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Lehmann, Winfred P. Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London: Routledge, 1993.
Michelazzo, Francesco. Nuovi itinerari alla scoperta del greco antico. Le strutture fondamentali della lingua greca: fonetica, morfologia, sintassi, semantica, pragmatica. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2007.
Palmer, Leonard R. The Greek Language. London: Faber Faber, 1980.
Pieraccioni, Dino. Morfologia storica della lingua greca. Florence: D’Anna, 1975.
Pierini, Rachele, and Renzo Tosi. Capire il greco, Bologna: Patron, 2014.
Pisani, Vittorio. Storia della lingua greca. Turin: Sei, 1960.
Szemerényi, Oswald J.L. Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, 4th ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Villar, Francisco. Los indoeuropeos y los orígenes de Europa. Lenguaje e historia. Madrid: Gredos, 1991.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Not Knowing Greek.” In The Common Reader. Reprint, Boston: Mariner Books, 2002.
Finally, some women walk this earth with lipstick in their handbag. I don’t wear lipstick, but for over a decade, I have traveled from city to city carrying a copy of Antoine Meillet’s incomparable Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque, published in France by Hachette in 1913 and the liberating source of inspiration that set everything in motion and made it all meaningful.