It's All Greek To Me

[mik3cap]

I recently asked my wonderful friend meerkitty if she would teach me ancient Greek. Her response was: "Are you serious? Really serious?" To which I replied yes, of course. She is a genius-level autodidact; and in addition to being able to build Internets from scratch (s r s l y), climb mountains, and fight oceans, she also knows many languages (I have seen and heard her translate medieval Latin aloud and before my very eyes). I thought that this would mainly involve her and me working remotely (as she has just moved to the Left coast) maybe doing some things online, sharing desktops on Macbooks or whatever - but she went an extra two miles and bought me a whole shelf full of Greek textbooks from Amazon.

I have this little fantasy of learning Greek and then helping with the translation of things like the Archimedes palimpsest. Somewhere in the back of my mind I picture myself becoming an elderly scholar and antiquarian who wends his way between ten foot tall stacks of dusty tomes and sorting through and scanning in century-old photos of Mayan ruins and spending days leafing through manuscripts and translating things. A very Call of Cthulhu kind of thing.

But I've got to learn some language first. :)

Comments

[dharleenk.livejournal.com]

good luck! i have a Classical Studies minor. I had similar fantasies, wanted to read the great tragedies in the original context. This drove me to take ancient Greek as my 'foreign language' requirement in undergrad. I found it terribly hard. I kept signing up for the next semester thinking "its going to click. this semester it will start to make sense!" Until my friends finally convinced me in my junior year that i spent way more time agonizing over my horrible greek homework than any other subject. unfortunately i don't remember any of it!

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Grecian literature and mythology was the first independent study I ever did, being the lonely kid who spent his time hanging out in the elementary school library. And those stories probably molded me right into the science fiction / speculative fiction / surrealist mindset! And prepared me for superhero comics...