Well, the books arrived. The Karyotakis, the crime novels, the kids’ school books, and the Greek grammar and language books for me.

My relationship with the Greek language is a long one. I first heard it before I was born. I’ve always been hearing it. I’ve always been speaking it. Sometimes speaking a funky mix of Greek and English. As a child I’d sometimes participate in a dialogue with my parents wherein I’d respond in English to their Greek. It worked perfectly well.

My education in the Greek language has been informal and yet intense. Because it’s always been around me I have a natural understanding of it, of its rhythms, its meanings. I have a rich, albeit passive, knowledge of it. I can understand it and read it better than I can speak it and write it. I don’t own enough vocabulary in order to relate an idea or a thought as I hear it in my head, hear it in English. This is funny because I can understand words that I may not ever use. Somehow my head gets caught between the two languages and I fumble, unable to find a word in either. Ideally, I’d like to have the grammatical and syntactical knowledge so that I may merge words and phrases into complete sentences and paragraphs that have force, and drama, and clarity.

Everyone says that my Greek is great - τα ελληνικά σου είναι πολύ καλά and it now takes much longer for people to ask me από που είσε because my accent and funky syntax once gave me away within the time it took me to complete one phrase. Of course, I can navigate my way through all the daily linguistic challenges that pose themselves in banks and public offices, around dinner tables and in shopping malls, on buses, planes, and trains, and when interviewing people for an article I write.
I can translate the Greek I hear and read into my perfect English, but I can’t write a feature article in Greek or persuade you of a philosophical point in Greek.

And so, rather tentatively, I open the Νεοελληννική Γραμματική -

- and from the mini-history on pages 246-248 I joyfully read that:

“The history of the language that you speak is engraved upon the very words that, spoken and sung for thousands of years now by millions of mouths, bring to us the very history of the nation.”

Meanwhile, back on back 7 is the note TO THE STUDENT - ΣΤΟ ΜΑΘΗΤΗ:

Πρόσεξε μονο, it says. Beware. “This language, as in the past, is today a living language. And you now know, because you are a grown-up child, that living organisms do not remain unchanging. They change…Only dead languages remain like fossils. The rest change. But they change very slowly, so slowly that those who speak the language do not feel it. And so it is with our language, because it is full of life, that it has taken on throughout the passing of time different shapes, until it arrived, spoken fluently from Greek mouths, to its current form, modern Greek.”