Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Actually, for me that one usually gets shunted to Latin, a language I only know a couple of useful phrases in (such as, "Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas."). Then again, in high school I wrote a play which has a character musing, "Cogito ergo ... sumthing or other; I forget. Ah! Cogito ergo oblivio!" (Hmm. So why is "Cogito ergo sum" repeated more often -- at least where I encounter it -- than Je pense donc je suis"? Did Descartes publish in Latin, or did folks quoting him later decide to apply the quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur principle?)

But every so often I catch "Il-y-a..." about to come out of my mouth just in time to put it back into the same language as the rest of the sentence it's introducing... (Not an issue if I'm standing next to a Francophone, of course.) And there are a few French words and phrases that get sprinkled into English that, if I'm a little tired, will flip my brain into French mode briefly so that the next couple of sentences get dragged along. And when there were television commercials for the Renault "Le Car", every damned time I saw one I thought, "Wait, I thought 'car' was feminine; shouldn't that be 'La Voiture' instead of "Le Car'?"

And I can't hear "In the beginning was the Word ..." (John 1:1) without echoing, "εν αρχη εστιν ο λογος, και ο λογος εστιν προς τον θεον, και ο λογος εστιν τον θεον," in my head (though occasionally the Modern Greek form of the verb pops up -- replace "εστιν" with "ην").

Greek roots are everywhere in English, so if my brain kept trying to change gears every time I encountered one it would be terribly distracting, but there are a few roots that grab my attention (especially θανατος', 'βαρυς', 'ταχυς', 'νοος' (as in "noosphere"), just off the top of my head) ... and sometimes I find myself searching for an English word with a particular Greek root (this happens a lot with 'γιγνωσκω', which does come into English in the words 'gnome' and 'know', but I keep wanting other related words ...)

And despite decades trying to get used to it, I still twitch at seeing all those '-ein' entries in etymologies -- when I was learning Greek we always looked up verbs by the first-person singular indicative instead of the infinitive that is the convention in English ('-ω' instead of '-ειν'), so looking at the etymology of 'ballistic', for example, I keep thinking it should list 'βαλλω' instead of 'βαλλειν') The same thing with Latin verbs doesn't seem as jarring because I never actually studied Latin, but still strikes me as odd when I think about it too much.


Er ... then again, (thinking back to the "il-y-a" example earlier, I also find myself thinking '∃' and '∀' in verbal streams of thought, not just thinking in symbols or preparing to write something down. This phenomenon is not as intense now as it was when I was in high school, and had mental pronounciations for '⊥', '||', '≅', '∴', etc.. So, either this is not just a "which languages I now a little of" thing, or any meme I know a character for gets incorporated into my concept of aural language. Hmm. Additional omphaloskepsis is probably warranted.