This is a reminder to myself: find and check out an introductory Sanskrit grammar. After picking up Monro's excellent reference text for Homeric grammar, I'm convinced that in order to understand why Homer's Greek is the way it is, you must know at least something about Sanskrit. I've been suspecting as much for a while now. The more you poke around at the innards of Greek, the more you run into Sanskrit. This in itself should be no surprise, as after all it was the similarity between Sanskrit and Greek that lead Sir William Jones to posit a common ancestral tongue called "Indo-European". But knowing this in an abstract sense is one thing; seeing it pop up over and over again throughout the Greek language (now that I know what to look for) is another. It's wild. Every time I think I've achieved some kind of meaningful knowledge of Greek, I realize that I'm only kidding myself, and that this language is far deeper than I could have ever possibly imagined when I first set out to learn it. A little bit of mastery can lead to madness. I started out with Attic Greek, only to be drawn forward into Koine Greek, Byzantine Greek, Modern Greek; then backward into Homer, Linear B, and Sanskrit. Where to from here?

This is the fundamental problem of learning things. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. And yet we stumble forward, convinced we might actually gain ground if we try hard enough, if we work hard enough, if we're somehow more brilliant than all those Brits and Germans from centuries gone by who learned Ancient Greek as toddlers and could read and write and speak in more languages than I can count on my fingers and toes and who could compose Sophoclean odes or Theocritcan idylls extemporaneously, in their sleep, standing on their heads, what have you. But you know what? It's impossible. Even for those giants of old there were languages that they didn't know, entire libraries full of books they'd never read, endless lifetimes of thoughts they'd never think, or even think they could think.

The life of the mind is a practical joke. Well, at least I'm laughing!