Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

If I take pills to make the voices go away, who will help me do math?" -- Mr. Dystopia (thanks to Interrobang for sending it to me).

#blink# #blink# Uh ... I've given myself quite a headache trying to do something that the web is probably not quite the right tool for yet.

I was trying to look up some (ancient) Greek vocabulary and declensions. (Stuff I knew once upon a time.)

I'd feel much more certain of what I was seeing if I could be sure of the spellings. But most of what I found was transliterated. Figuring out which Roman character to use in place of a Greek one is easy. Being sure which Greek character someone else substituted a Roman character for ... makes me nervous and uncertain when it comes to some of the vowels. Especially when an ending doesn't look quite right: is it transliterated funny, or is it a third declension noun (all of which look funny anyhow)? My dictionary already gives the standard English transliterations; I specifically wanted to see them in Greek.

And there are other problems: How do I Google for the Greek spelling of a Greek word? Some sites use the &element; tags to spell things out while others use Unicode and/or a Greek font, and some of those are clearly rendering incorrectly in my browser while others look sane. I found a chart of third declension endings, but I don't trust it because several letters are clearly wrong.

Along the way I tripped over a Greek joke-of-the-day archive. I made the mistake of peering at a few of the archived messages to see whether I could read them. Unsurprisingly, I couldn't, but I learned two new things: 1) looking at whole sentences in transliterated Greek (Greek words spelled in the Roman alphabet) really hurts my brain -- I completely fail to recognize words; it looks like line noise or Perl or something, and if I slow waaaaay down and figure it out word by word, it still looks All Wrong. 2) Reading italicized Greek makes my eyes hurt; I can't tell upsilon from nu at the default size, and I keep thinking I see characters that aren't there -- telling Opera to zoom to 150% makes it legible again (I still can't translate it, but it looks as though I ought to be able to read it, and I can pronounce it). If the letters aren't leaning over like that, I can read them smaller. 3) running across an English word in the middle of a Greek sentence is disturbing only after I realize that I've just pronounced an English word without having noticed when I switched alphabets and switched back again. But seeing transliterated Greek in the next paragraph breaks my brain again. "[...] ο οποις ειχε στειλει αν θυμαστε ενα quiz στην παρουσα λιστα [...]"

(Okay, none of this is as bad as the time I got brain-lock staring at one of Lee Moyer's paintings because I couldn't read an inscription over a doorway. I started reading it in Roman letters, got to a Pi, switched to Greek, backed up, read it again, got past the Pi and ran into an 'R', switched to Roman, backed up, reinterpreted the Rho in between as a 'P', kept backing up, hit the Pi, switched to Greek, moved forward, hit the 'P' and mentally changed it to a Rho again, ran into the 'R', and was stuck in an infinite loop with a growing feeling of distress for several minutes before I finally turned to Lee and asked him what the Hell it said. When he told me, I realized that the Pi was a pair of capital 'T's joined together. I snarled at him to Never Do That Again. I think he thought it was funny. I had just spent several minutes not being able to read. <<shudder>> I was about ready to cry.)

I forwarded the URL of the joke archive site to my mother and one of my cousins. I just hope that the jokes don't turn out to be offensive and/or stupid.

There are a few familiar words that don't hurt when I see them transliterated -- I guess frequent exposure helps: "anthropos", "psyche", "logos", "theos". And recognizing Greek roots in English words has never bothered me (though if I happen to notice a compound that's half Greek and half Latin I'll twitch briefly; fortunately I often fail to notice them). But clicking on a link where I expect to get Greek text, and getting lines of Roman letters trying to spell out Greek words instead, makes my eyes and my brain hurt. Not as badly as trying to make sense of those tables of declensions that mixed uppercase and lowercase randomly and seemed to have extra letters inserted in the middle, but badly enough.

BTW, for a completely unrelated pursuit, can anyone point me in the direction of a web-accessible New Testament in Greek? My paper copy (two columns; ancient Greek on one side and modern Greek on the other -- I can even understand a few verses here and there) is buried in a box in the basement along with way too many other books I'd like to have fingertip access to again someday.