Much later, when I was a freshman in college learning Greek, I sat in a classroom with three other students every weekday morning at nine o’clock, and we would recite, precisely the way you might play scales, the paradigms of nouns and verbs, each noun with its five possible incarnations depending on its function in the sentence, each verb with its scarily metastasizing forms, the tenses and moods that don’t exist in English, the active and passive voices, yes, those I knew about from high-school French, but also the strange “middle” voice, a mode in which the subject is also the object, a
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