Actually, I'm not a Clancy fan (to put it mildly) but I wouldn't totally discount "near future" fiction writing from people like Clancy who are well-plugged into the USA defense community.

...sure declassified government documents on the subject would be better, but we can't always have that.

Hey Yannis, OOC, I noticed you posted a Greek excerpt, presumably from an ancient text from Diogenes. As a (presumably native) Greek yourself, can you actually read and understand ancient Greek? I know for English I have severe trouble with Shakespeare, and his stuff is only 300 years old or so. Old English may as well be, well, Greek to me, and that stuff is pretty darn recent compared to ancient Greek texts.

@T.E.D. Hey. Attic Greek (classical Athens) is a required subject in schools here, one I failed repeatedly ;). I can vaguely understand classic texts, the syntax can be extremely hard to parse at times, but the words are recognizable and the majority is still in use today (in more or less the same form). In that excerpt there are only two words I don't immediately recognize (ὁπηνίκα & ἀπῆρεν), hopefully they aren't curse words ;)

That said, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is also one of the easier ancient texts. It's essentially a summary of other sources, written in plain language sometime in the 3rd century AD, a time when Attic had normalized to exactly the dialect we were taught in school. The language changes significantly when the author uses direct quotes from much earlier writers, and some of the quotes I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

I guess that's similar to what Latin's situation used to be here. Now most schools don't even offer it. I took it back in the day, but got mostly D's, and don't remember any of it. So I'm sympathetic. I love linguistics, but absoultely suck at learning (non-computer) languages.

My brother-in-law actually majored in Classical Greek (he's working on his PhD now), but to my knowledge he's the only person I've ever met who has learned it who wasn't shooting to enter the ministry.

@YannisRizos - I do. a 3-letter one. But it's in Russian and will get flagged :)

@T.E.D. - the problem with Clancy is that he doesn't (expectedlly) cite which of the points his books have are based on actual research and which are artistic license. As a former Clancy fan (before he sold out) - heck, a contributor to FAQ -, I am way against that answer - totally opposite of your situation :)