Greek: 10 reasons to love Greek

1. Λένα Πλάτωνος.
2. The Wire's The Greek.
3. Learning Greek alphabet is a prerequisite for Russian alphabet.
4. You probably know a few letters already: π,λ,ρ,δ,α,β, at least.
5. Understanding Greek pronunciation of β and θ will help you grok Spanish and Russian pronunciation of b/v/β/в. How do you pronounce Barcelona? βarθelona. Now you know.
6. Great course for Greek available.
7. All the cool kids (Mises, Schopenhauer...) use Greek in their books, and they won't translate it for you, because it would be insulting to assume you don't know Greek.
8. Suddenly lots of words in all languages will make sense to you:
   • Thanks in Greek is ευχαριστώ [el]. Think of eucharistie [fr]
   • What's an atom? Something you can't divide, same as an individual. άτομο [el] is simply Greek for individual [en], which is just the latin version, individuus [la], both following the same composition of a- and in- for not divisible. You've seen those a- and in- everywhere, too. Think anarchy [en], or incest [en]...
   • γαλα [el], milk [en], think of galaxy [en], from Greek γαλαξίας [el], Milky Way [en]...
   • megalopolis [en] is just Greek for "big city". You know of course μέγας [el] from the SI and πόλις [el] from politics [en], to be confused with πολύς [el], many [en] as in “Politics, n: Poly "many" + tics "blood-sucking parasites"”.
   • εσπέρα [el] is evening [en], same as vespéral [fr]
   • catastrophe [en] is of course καταστροφή [el], hence catacomb [en] is κατά [el] + τύμβα [el]
   • apology [en] from απολογία [el]
   • ophtalmology [en] and odontology [en]? You guessed it.
   • Hell even slavic languages share roots with Greek: πίνω [el], пить [ru], piť [sk], etc. (or even better: πιω [el] and piju [cs])
9. conversely, Greek uses some funny loan-words from French:
   • γκαρσóνι [el]
   • καλτσόν [el]
   • κραγιόν [el]
   • κρουασάν [el]
   • σουτιέν [el]
   • φερμουάρ [el]
   • and also ασανσέρ [el], ascenseur [fr], elevator [en]
10. Greek's capitalization rules are so fun Internet Explorer can't handle them.

More Greek etymologies

Looks like the Greeks weren't wearing much more than sandals (which is from Greek σάνδαλον [el]) so most other clothes-related words are from later languages: