at the end of our second weekend in the greece, we now have a small wi-fi transmitter hooked up to my computer, and local cell phone service. however, it still is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for us to load a webpage anywhere in the apartment, so i am sitting at the local café, using their wi-fi to post some non-visual impressions about the greece. we read that greece has some of the slowest internet speeds in europe anyway, but given our housing situation, it may be another two months before i have sufficient bandwidth to post a single photo (apart from iphone straight to facebook).
apart from internet deprivation, however, we are enjoying athens. delicious food, friendly people, and a wonderfully relaxed attitude toward life (which, admittedly, also extends to rules about smoking and parking). people appreciate that we speak greek, and it’s fun to try. also humbling to realize how little a 3+/3+ language test score gets you in the real world. and with that, it’s again time to μαθαίνουμε λίγα ελληνικά!
today, we’ll look at spelling. greek has five different ways of spelling the sound “ee.”there is the iota, or ι; the eta, or η; the upsilon, or υ; the epsilon iota, or ει; and the omicron iota, or οι. there also are two o’s, the omicron, or ο, and the omega, or ω. this mattered today because i was taking down a street name, “virinos” in transliteration, and i wanted to spell it in greek. so, is it “βιρινος,” or “βιρηνος,” or “βυρινως,” or “βειροινος,” or … there are, as i calculate it, 50 possible spellings of this word. even more than before, i understand why non-english speakers find our language so difficult to learn.
next: who knows?