But it's all worth it, because the Greek verb also leads to more than its fair share of exciting discoveries. (I daresay the same can be said for the Greek noun, but I've not got that far yet.)
Take the word paideuo, for instance. (I'm going to go ahead and do the best I can with transliterating, asking pardon in advance from Euripides.) It means, "I educate," which is all very well; the thing I thought was most important is that it is derived from paidos, or "child". Leaving aside the fact that apparently the ancient Greeks did not believe in adult education, it makes you wonder. Because the Hindi word for "educate" is similar... So you would think there would also be a related Hindi word for "child", but offhand I can't think of one, or at least nothing that is in common use.
Then there's pempo, which is, "I send." The closest English derivative the textbook comes up with is "pomp" (apparently the root Latin/Greek word meant "procession"; you can see the logic). But if you cross half a continent, Telugu gives you a near-identical word that means precisely the same as the Greek.
Admittedly, these are scarcely new discoveries; but it's one thing to read an essay about the proto-Indo-European language (I think I have the term right), and another to see the certainty of its existence revealed word by word. You feel every bit as thrilled as a physicist who has measured the Big Bang, and you have the added advantage of being able to see the origins of language without having to build a Large Hadron Collider and have people accuse you of wanting to poke holes in the fabric of space-time.
Happy New Year.
