On Language

A Guide for the Perplexed

I took French from the 7th to the 12th grade, and then did not touch it again until my second round of grad school required me to demonstrate some skill in it, translating by hand some portion of a long French article on Neoplatonism in Egypt. I was permitted a dictionary, and surprised myself with how much of the grammar I could recall or recognize at sight, but also struck by how six or seven years of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew had reshaped the way that I thought about language in general by that point.