Title of the resource
Title of the resource in english
Publisher
First Éditions
Original language
Target and Age Group
The general public
Author of the Entry:
Marta Pszczolińska, University of Warsaw, m.pszczolinska@al.uw.edu.pl
Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Elżbieta Olechowska, University of Warsaw, elzbieta.olechowska@gmail.com
Second Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Ayelet Peer, Bar- Ilan University, ayelet.peer@biu.ac.il
Marie-Dominique Porée
Marie-Dominique Porée is a grammar teacher and a Latin literature specialist. She is a professor of Greek and classical literature at the Lycée La Bruyère in Versailles and teaches classes preparing for higher education. She is authored many books about the French language and literature and the ancient Greek.
Contents & Purpose
Le grec ancien facile is a mini textbook of Greek grammar. The author wants to convince the reader that ancient Greek is not dead as it is still present in the French language and that it is not so difficult to learn. Though the textbook is really of pocket size (8,5x12cm) it contains a 160-page long full grammar course starting from letters and articles through declensions and contractions or irregular verbs to the syntax.
The references to classical antiquity are not many, but they do appear even in such a small textbook. First of all the reader sees Odysseus and Penelope on the cover in a witty illustration. Odysseus is shown running ahead, exclaiming that he is going for the Trojan war and that will be back in 5 minutes, Penelope barely noticing.
In the grammatical resources, antiquity appears even in the first exercise in which the task is to re-write uppercase names of 23 Greek gods and deities into lowercase. At the end of the book, after the glossary finishing the grammatical resources, one can find a collection of famous quotes to be learned in the original Greek words, along with explanations of their meaning and provenience. Among them, one can find, for example, two of the seven Delphic sentences: γνῶθι σεαυτόν [gnōthi seautón] -“know thyself” and μηδέν ἄγαν [mēdèn ágan] - “nothing in excess“.
