The Dangers of Learning Greek

After class on Monday I decided to get a head start on memorizing the Imperfect tense. I thought it would be a good idea to write the verb endings on the back of my hand in permanent marker so that I could check it throughout the day and remind myself of the endings. Unfortunately I was exhausted that day, and a little bit later I happened to fall asleep at my desk. I woke up in a hurry, almost late for class, but before I left my room I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror… and noticed the imprint of Greek letters that had transferred from my hand to my forehead while I was sleeping! Thankfully I figured out that eye-makeup remover also works on permanent black marker…. Haha at least I’ve got the endings down now (I think).

Greek Gods & Goddesses in the News

Two upcoming epic events!

On Not Knowing Greek

From an essay written by Virginia Woolf about the strangeness and difficulty of reading Greek literature:

For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?

And later in the essay, on the power of Greek literature:

Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Aeschylus, or Racine, or Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have Sappho with her constellations of adjectives; Plato daring extravagant flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away; while in the Odyssey we have what remains the triumph of narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of the fortunes of men and women.

For the full essay, click here.

How (not) to Teach and Learn Greek

Homework for Monday 1/25

- learn new vocabulary on pp. 24-25

- written homework: choose one regular verb (i.e. NOT a deponent) and conjugate in the present active and middle/passive, including infinitives