#the accents I typed are totally wrong but I only have modern Greek as a keyboard so.. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ninjagoestogreece · 7 years

Text

LANGUAGE GYMNASTICS

“Fití .. tria?” asks Michael. My professor sighs. “You’re the only boy in this class and you keep getting this wrong. Fi-ti-TIS, Μικάλι. Male student. You’re the only one who gets to use that ending and you’re the only one who’s gonna screw up all the jobs and titles and adjectives because of it.” It’s 11AM, but none of the six of us in my Accelerated Modern Greek class are truly awake. There’s a coffee or a juice on every desk. My face feels plastered in a contorted position, half from exhaustion, half from a semi-permanent state of confusion. Most of us have Greek family members, or have studied Ancient Greek enough to understand the sounds and the roots of some of the vocab. I, however, took Spanish for eight years and multilingual choir for twelve. I know how to learn a language, or at the very least, say a few sentences convincingly. I should be good at this. And yet ...

Ι genuinely know a handful of languages, including English, Spanish, a little Hebrew and Yiddish for religious/familial purposes, and enough Latin to get around most choral services and performances. In the US, I’m pretty good at keeping the vocab I need in the correct environments. But here, where Greek sounds similar to some of the languages I know, I get turned around easily. Most of the time I’m stuck in pidgin, a type of tongue halfway between two or more real languages. I’ll end up with sentences like “Prefiero ένα salada, παρακαλώ” “Θέλω χυμό de manzana,” or “אױ װײ, είμαι cansada.” It doesn’t help that most Athenians are also fluent in English, contrary to popular belief; I want to practice my Greek so badly, but the words I currently know are very limited, and when a local senses that I’m lost, they immediately switch to my dominant one.

It’s not even the pronunciation that gets me most of the time. Greek is spoken behind the teeth in the middle of the palate, for the most part, like Spanish, with some throatier sounds like those featured in Hebrew and Yiddish. Although my “gamma” ends up swallowed by my Hebrew “chai”, tagging me rather obviously as a Jew in most settings, I can get around with the right sounds and the few dozen words I have memorized. It’s mostly the lettering and trying to read. Forget the fact that American Greek organizations use the ancient letter names instead of the modern ones. Fourteen of the twenty-four capital letters look like they do in English, five of which make different sounds than I recognize. Sometimes the lower case is the same as the upper, but sometimes it looks like a totally different English letter. “Eta” is the worst. In Greek, it takes the shape of an English “H” in upper case, an elongated “n” in lower case (η), and sounds like “ee”. That’s right -- two English consonants make the same singular Greek vowel. Did I mention that two other letters and two diphthongs ALSO make that sound? Meanwhile, the other half of the alphabet has yet to convince me that they’re real letters -- they look like calculus, and I stopped taking math when I was seventeen. I trip over Ξ, Ψ, and Ω every time they pop up. And then there’s the accents. In Latin-based languages like Spanish, the emphasis is on the penultimate vowel unless otherwise noted. In Greek? Vowels can be anywhere. Even if they’re noted, all of us get lost in the string of sounds.

I missed speaking easily and learning quickly, so I was thankful that I’d signed up to visit Barcelona this weekend. Finally, I could go back to Spanish -- stretch my muscles and not be stuck with stuttering in Greek or truncating my English. Instead, I was greeted with a rude reminder: Barcelona isn’t truly “Spain” as we know it. It lies in a region called “Catalunya”, a state that’s pushing for independence (shout-out to fellow SU student Alan for the comic). As a part of Spain in technicality, it’s required that students learn the language, but the dominant tongue of the area is Catalan, which has a grammar that is at first glance closer aligned with Italian and has a pronunciation set of its own. Throw in some jet lag, general rustiness, and a month listening to a wholly separate system of speaking, and I was lost again. While I could read Spanish when it was posted on my own, and could get around, I still caught myself saying “συγγνώμη” while bumping through a bustling street, nodding “ναι” instead of “sí” to questions I understood, and thanking people for change with “ευχαριστώ”. The new Greek, as hard as it was, was sticking quickly, and under the duress of the jump to a fourth, totally different language, I was clinging to it even more than English at times. To my surprise, I missed Athens -- I missed the routine I’d made for myself there, the sounds and the people I’d already connected to.

By some miracle, just before I left, I earned an A on my first Greek test. I’m not sure that I deserve it still, seeing as how much I struggled with ending verbs with an “ω” and not an “ο”, but I’m not about to complain either. Every new word takes forever to get into my head, but the speaking and reading gets simpler every day. Something is happening, each and every day, and it’s sticking to me bit by bit. I just have to stick to it in return.

#2/19/17 #writing #ninja goes to greece #study abroad #languages

1 note · View note