of Athan. H. Papandropoulou
While in the interior of the country our language is systematically dragged out and extorted by the well-known barbarians, for whom the "wooden" language of monkeys is a way of expression, here is what leading personalities of the spirit have said and written about our language and its expressive richness and free thought:
*Marcus Tilius Cicero (the most famous man of ancient Rome): "If the gods speak, then they certainly use the language of the Greeks"
*Goethite (Germany's greatest poet and prose writer): “I heard in St. Peter of Rome the Gospel in all languages. The Greek resounded like a bright star in the night"
*Claudius Fouriel (French Academician and poet): "Greek has a homogeneity like German, but it is richer than it. It has the clarity of French, but it has more precision. It is more flexible than Italian and much more harmonious than Spanish. In other words, it has what it takes to be considered the most beautiful language in Europe"
*Helen Keller (blind American writer): "If the violin is the most perfect musical instrument, then the Greek language is the violin of human thought"
*Margarita Jursenar (French writer Ms. Akadimaikos): "I loved this language, Greek, for its robust plasticity, that each of its words attests to its direct and different contact with truths and because everything that has been said to be good by man has as mostly told in this language"
*Schiller (German poet, historian and philosopher): "Cursed Greeks, you found it all, philosophy, geometry, physics, astronomy - you left nothing for us"
*Voltaire (French enlightener): "May the Greek language become common to all peoples"
*E. Norden (German philologist): "Except for Chinese and Japanese, all other languages were formed under the influence of Greek, from which they took, in addition to many words, rules and grammar"
*O. Vadruska (professor of Linguistics at the University of Vienna): "For a Japanese or a Turk, all European languages do not appear as separate, but as dialects of one and the same language, Greek"
*Will Duran (American historian and philosopher, professor at Columbia University): "Our alphabet came from Greece through Kymi and Rome. Our language is full of Greek words. Our science forged an international language through Greek terms. Our grammar and rhetoric, even punctuation and paragraphing, are Greek inventions. Our literary genres are Greek - the lyric, the ode, the romance, the novel, the treatise, the address, the biography, the history and above all the vision. And almost all these words are Greek"
*Francis Ligora (Italian university professor and president of the International Academy for the Diffusion of Culture): "Greeks, be proud to speak the Greek language alive and the mother of all other languages. Don't neglect it, since this is one of the few goods we have left and at the same time your passport to world culture"
*Frederick Sagredo (Basque professor of Linguistics, president of the Greek Academy of the Basque Country): "The Greek language is the best heritage available to man for the development of his brain. Compared to Greek, all and I insist, all languages are inadequate"
"The ancient Greek language must become the second language of all Europeans, especially cultured people"
"The Greek language is essentially divine"
*Jacqueline de Romiguy (French Academic and co-authors): "Ancient Greece offers us a language that is universal. Especially in France, the Greek language would help us to understand our own language".
photo GregMontani / https://pixabay.com
