One of the last things we will be doing this semester is reading part of a Greek book called Σταυροδρόμι των Ψυχών. This book is a romantic novel, which normally wouldn’t be my choice of genre, but since Smaragda had it on hand, it became my genre. We have only read through about half a page, and I have already filled up a page of notes on new vocabulary. However, I know enough now to understand that it begins with a serene old monk, who had been painting a picture of the front of his monastery, but was interrupted by a storm which had begun to whip up. While most of the churches in Greece are in crowded areas, the monasteries tend to be on rocky cliffs by the sea, as far away from the population as they can be. We discussed how in these few paragraphs, we could see hints of how monasteries are named, and the epithets which are attributed to the Virgin Mary for miracles which have taken place at different places.

In a similar vein as one of my previous cultural posts, Greece celebrates its independence from Turkey on March 25^th. On this day, children are out of school, adults also have the day off, and everything shuts down except for restaurants. The children parade through the streets with their schools, in strict order by class, academic grades, gender, and height. The children all wear matching outfits consisting of a dark blue pants or skirts, and a white shirt, with black dress shoes. They carry flags and school signs, and march in this rigid order until the end of the parade, when the parents swoop up their children and all go out to eat as a family. There is a traditional food for the day, cod served with a paste made from garlic, lemon, and potatoes, which everyone eats.

Τάβλι might as well be the national game of Greece. This is a collection of three different board games, which are played in sequence with the same board and pieces. The first of these games is common in America as backgammon, while the other two have similar rules, but capturing pieces has different meanings between the three. The games are played in groups of three over and over between two people until one of them has accumulated 10 total wins.

Τάβλι is especially popular with the old men in Greece, but pretty anyone can whip out a board the moment you ask: Να παίξοθμε τάβλι;

Adding to the list of things I didn’t think about in the past which seem fairly obvious now is that in Greece, they play different sports than we do I America. While children here play basketball and football, and some of the adventurous ones shoot and go mountain biking, in Greece they mostly swim and play soccer, volleyball, and a little basketball. They do not seem to particularly enjoy expensive sports or those that are full-contact or dangerous. It seems that Americans might prefer to have fun with the thrill of danger while the Greeks are more conservative in their play.

In one of my conversations with Smaragda, we talked about how Greek and Americans perceive coffee. I had never put much thought into this topic before, but she asked me why Americans would think that there could be such a thing as “regular coffee.” She contends that there cannot be such a thing, since espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, filter coffee, Greek coffee, and other variations are all just parts of a subset in a category called “coffee.” In Greece, such an idea is unthinkable, and someone who asks for “regular” coffee would be treated with a blank stare or a restated question. We did our research, and learned that while many different countries influenced Greece’s coffee habits, America’s came only from England or France in 1773, and those countries produced filter coffee. Most of the others didn’t come along and become recognized until centuries later, when the idea of what coffee is had been firmly fixed in the American mind. I continue to be amazed at how differently two cultures can perceive something so simple as coffee. I still have a lot to learn, even when I thought I had a pretty good handle on Greek culture.

Greeks are some of the most strong-willed people the world  probably has when it comes to their culture. I find this somewhat ironic, that they will stiffly resist anything from Turkey, but many of their words, recipes, coffee, and place names are of Turkish origin. Most of these influences come from Constantinople, while Greeks adamantly refuse to call the city Istanbul as the Turks do. Theirs is not necessarily flag-waving patriotism so much as an insistence on the integrity of their culture. This comes as no surprise, since Greece has a holiday on the 28^th of October sometimes called Όχι Day, literally “No!” Day, celebrating the Greek Prime Minister in 1940 refusing to be coerced into a compromising agreement with Italy, which then started their role in World War 2.

To my ears, Greek music largely sounds the same. To help train my ears differently, Smaragda and I studied songs for a week or two. One of the hallmarks of Greek folk music is the        Μπουζούκι. This is an instrument which resembles and sounds like a mandolin, but it has a neck as long as a guitar. We studied several songs, but spent special times analyzing the lyrics of one called “Αγγελέ Μου”, and a song called “Το Κορίτσι”, a pop song and an alternative song, respectively, to compare the different genres in Greek music. Maybe all Greek music doesn’t sound the same, but it is much harder to hear differences when I can’t understand the lyrics.

Coming out of winter, Smaragda told me that it wasn’t fair that I only visited Greece at Christmas, because it did not give a good look at the country the way it is meant to be seen. “Greece was made for the summer,” she said, “so you cannot have an opinion until you’ve seen it in both winter and summer.”

I talked with Myrsini and Andreas about my visit, and they both made the same complaint. According to Andreas, summer is a time for the young men to visit bars and get into trouble. Smaragda and Myrsini preferred to use summer as a time to drink coffee, go to the beach, and visit bars. They said to expect maybe 4 hours per night of sleep, since the rest of the day has to be spent doing these three things.

Smaragda has had a book for many years called Σταυροδρόμι των Ψυχών, The Crossroads of the Soul. Normally, it wouldn’t be my first choice of book, but I’m excited that I understand a fair number of words in the first couple pages. If she weren’t there to point out some of the other words, I surely wouldn’t be able to piece it all together, but we read through the first page or two in an almost reasonable amount of time. I’m not much of a romance novel reader, but Σταυροδρόμι των Ψυχών is the only Greek book I have read from, and the ability to read makes me happier than the content necessarily does.

We did a segment on Greek patriotism of Greek Independence Day. Smaragda gave me a song called “Παλληκάπι Είκοσι Χρονώ”, “A Young Lad of 20 Years”. This song tells of a young man who returns from an uneventful war, only to be killed on his way back in a place called Γκιούλ Μπάξες, the Rose Garden (also translated as Pomegranate Garden). We talked about how everything shuts down except for restaurants, and how everyone goes out to eat after the parades hosted by local schools.

Following in the vein of sports and games, we had a class meeting which looked at the rules and etiquette for card games, and things to say during a card game. Smaragda taught me some vocabulary including “to shuffle”, “to deal”, “to bet”, “to win”, and “to lose”. She made me spend the rest of class constructing sentences from these words and vocab we already covered in the Sports & Games section. This way, I will be able to do more than just silently play a hand of poker. We learned more than just the vocabulary, but made sure that I could play some of the more common card games played in Greece. Backgammon is very popular in Greece, so we learned a few terms about it as well. Θέλεις να παίξομε χαρτιά;

On a wild hair, we decided to dedicate a few classes to learning about sports and games. I had mixed feelings learning about this topic. Sporty feeling was in the air, in the wake of March Madness, and with the weather getting a little bit warmer. I’m eager to learn about these topics, so that I might be able to speak about and offer to play with others in Greek. Many of the names for sport are foreign, such as “Μπάσκετ” (“Basket”, basketball). However, a great number of them only have Greek names that would be recognizable to Greeks, such as ορεινή ποδηλασία (mountain biking). My concern for these is that their names for sports tend to be very long, and will be a bit of a struggle to memorize. Fortunately, many of the games have shorter names than the sports, and most of the verbs and people associated with sports have some connections to English. I anticipate that my challenge here will be just memorizing sports names.

We have embarked on another unit of pronouns, this time focusing on indefinites. These are easier to remember, because parts of the words are found in other words, such as καθένας (every one), whose root, κάθε, “every”, is found in words like καθεμέρα, “everyday”. Every one of the indefinite pronouns (or at least the ones we covered) has a recognizable root in other Greek words, so they are not at all difficult to keep track of: much better than memorizing the definite pronouns, which have nothing to recall any parts of their meaning, except their endings to indicate person, number, and gender. They melt into other words and become indistinguishable to me in speech. Even though these past few class meetings have been about indefinite pronouns, I will still be spending more of my energy on remembering the definite ones.

This week we launched into pronouns with in full force, and saw how they and our other topics fit into lyrics from popular Greek songs. I really enjoyed listening and reading through the songs. I have always had trouble understanding Greek songs because I will catch one word and then get swept away by the beat. This practice was fun and helped me get used to the words that commonly get elided or sound differently than in prose.

Hopefully, by hearing words in different contexts, prose versus more poetic, I can start to understand idioms more gracefully. After translating and singing a few pages of Greek, my goal is to have to improve my voice quality more than my pronunciations.

In these past few weeks, Smaragda and I discussed the different endings attached to words to signify size or quality. These include endings to show whether the noun were a place where something is found, a place where there is a lot of something, large, or small. These would be simple enough, except that there are several endings for each of these, and each of these changes by case, number, and gender, adding up to several hundred endings to modify nouns. These took some remembering, but I’ve gotten a decent grasp on general endings, so it hasn’t been too bad, especially since I was already familiar with some of the ones which meant “little”. However, we’ve also started covering pronouns. There are hundreds more of these to learn, even just scratching the surface, so I’m a bit concerned as to how well I’ll be able to handle those.

We started off the semester by reflecting on what I learned while we were in Greece. After returning, I could have kicked myself for my shyness. Many times, I would think of something which I knew I could say in Greek, but I would usually hold myself back. My fear of slipping up or taking too long to say a simple phrase would paralyze me and keep me from offering a simple thought to Smaragda’s family or friends. It was more the awareness of the fact that I would speak slowly that would impede my speech than anything else, even though the “language hacking” video encourages us to speak despite ourselves.

Many of the people I met in Greece did not speak much or any English, so we would not be able to speak except through Smaragda, who was sometimes not around to interpret. This led to many instances of me sitting around looking at someone and just nodding or smiling for long periods of time.

If I could have done anything differently in Greece, I definitely would have spoken up more.

If I were given a grant for a linguistic study of Greek, my first purchase would be a plane ticket. Once in Greece, I would go to Greek archaeologists and classical historians and talk to them to learn about ancient and classical Greece as much as I could. I would be interested to learn what the major differences are between classical and modern Greek, and what brought about these changes. In a nutshell, the modern version is simpler, using fewer types of accents and fewer cases than its ancestor. One hypothesis might be that the nation has developed a higher-context form of communication, so that the specificity and tedium of classical Greek would be made obsolete. Of course, to work on such a hypothesis, I would need to acquaint myself very familiarly with the culture of both modern and classical Greece. The studies of semantics and the branching out of languages could play an especially strong role in this study, as well as the readings on how a language dies. The research would raise the question of whether classical Greek is a dead language or preserved in the continuance of modern Greek. While I would find the research opportunity fascinating, I would likely cause more questions to be asked than answered.

I prefer to write in Greek by hand, since it comes more naturally to me. Although most of the letters are on the same key in the keyboard as their closest approximations, there are some which do not agree at all. For instance, the w key types a ς (sigma), and the q key types a semicolon, which is used as a question mark. I have started to get the hang of indirect discourse, and realize that the formulae for complex and compound sentences are the same as in English. The agreement rules make sense, and usually make endings match, so they remove much of the ambiguity found in some English phrases, and have a set of accenting rues to further clarify.

For instance:

Μπορώ να έχω έναν κατάλογο; May I have a menu? (Literally, “ ‘Can I’ ‘to’ ‘I have’ ‘a’ ‘menu’?”)

The omegas match to indicate the first person, and the -αν and -ο endings indicate a match between the article and the noun.

Even when the endings do not match by letter, there are very specific rules for what cases and tenses merit which endings.

Languages often go extinct when nobody is taught them as a first language anymore. In the case of Siletz Dee-ni, the language was discouraged and actively stamped out by the conquering American government. Schools and reservations were established to minimize its influence on the continent, and it fell to only five known people who still understand it. When a language dies, even if we still have some writings, then we lose any chance to fully appreciate the peoples which spoke it and the depth of their culture, and we can only learn about it from archaeology and hypothesis, rather than from conversations. I don’t believe that a dead language can ever really eb brought back to life. While a people may begin to speak it again, the chain of tradition has been broken, and it will be almost as though they began to speak an entirely new language.

Greek pretty much has its own branch in the Indo-European language family tree. In the Hellenic arm, there are several iterations of the same language, going down to Modern Greek. Other than a few English and Turkish words, it is fairly purebred in its sounds, and structures. Greeks are a proud people, and their language reflects that pride, to maintain a pure language, passed down almost without blemish from the time of the classical epics. Since then, they have dropped the use of the many different types of accents, making a much simpler language which is easier to learn and read.