I've just been going over my latest chapters of the textbook that deal with the future tense to get the information firmly into my head before attacking the workbook. My head is full of contractions and ablauts; tense formative sigmas or epsilon sigmas; words that have two different roots but act as one; and all the other information that is not entirely settled into its logical place in my brain.
So I start to do the first exercise, carefully working out the person, number, tense, voice, mood (hard one, that, as we have only done indicative as yet!), and the lexical form. All going well, so far.
Then the actual whole point of the exercise - the inflected meaning. And I find myself staring at it blindly, trying to comprehend what to put in this box... So how do you render future in English?
"I will do" better next time, but I just thought I'd share.
The chance that studying joins driving as one of those things I don't do if I'm tired?
4 comments:
I can sing "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in Chinese Mandarin.
How would it go in Greek?
I can remember looking at a personalised number plate (can't remember what it said now) and trying to translate it because I thought it was in Latin.
I was tired.
For Crazy Sister:-
κεφαλαι, ὦμοι, γονατα και δακτυλοι
(γονατα και δακτυλοι)
κεφαλαι, ὦμοι, γονατα και δακτυλοι
(γονατα και δακτυλοι)
και ὀφθαλμος και ὦτα και στομα και ῥις
κεφαλαι, ὦμοι, γονατα και δακτυλοι
(γονατα και δακτυλοι)
Problem being there are WAY too many syllables for each line. And hardly anyone can read Greek characters.
A transliteration would read:
kephalai, omoi, gonata kai daktyloi
(gonata kai daktyloi)
kephalai, omoi, gonata kai daktyloi
(gonata kai daktyloi)
kai ophalmos kai hota kai stoma kai ris
kephalai, omoi, gonata kai daktyloi
(gonata kai daktyloi)
Obviously, it also depends which version of the song you know, because this is not the one I know from Play School with "us all clapping hands together", it's the one that goes onto "eyes and ears and mouth and nose". Have fun!
I should also specify that this is the version that Jesus sang growing up. Little Greek-speaking boys and girls of today would probably not recognise half the words. There have been a few changes in the language in the last couple of millenia.
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