It’s All Greek To Me

When I was young, a mere мальчики, I became very fascinated with Russian and decided I wanted to learn it. The fact that I wasn’t a человек with an aptitude for languages didn’t matter: there was a book about how to learn Russian in my house, and it had a cool picture on the front (maybe it was a матрёшка) and they were the second most significant country in the world – I already knew English.

I think part of my fascination was the Cyrillic script. This looked like the letters I was used to, only different. Some were the same but had different sounds, some looked like the were mirror images or upside-down and some looked completely different. It was completely безумный, truth be told. Other languages had more exotic looking letters, but I couldn’t fathom those out at all.

Although I never learned Russian properly, even now I don’t know a single слово, I did at one point know all the pronouciations of the letters, which meant I could write people’s names, for example, in Russian.

Many years later, a similar experience happened to me in respect of the Greek alphabet. Learning all kinds of odd mathematical uses for the Greek letters I rediscovered my fascination: once again some were the same but sounded different, some looked different and some didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.

There was one difference though, the letters were always referred to by their names: theta, nu, sigma, delta, pi etc. I didn’t know how you pronouced the letters at all.

So I went to the library, found a Greek dictionary and wrote them all out, pausing briefly to consider whether to bother with the obsolete letters as well. You know, just for a laugh. But I didn’t.

I went further than I did with the Russian and for a time, riddled with paranoia, I wrote in my notebook in Greek letters so if anyone found it, they’d need a Greek dictionary and a lot of time to work out what I’d said. And hopefully they’d think it was in actual Greek, rather than a reverse Greeklish and my secrets would be safe.