(b)logophile

At the restaurant the other night, I had a genuine spontaneous conversation in Greek. It went like this (while I was sitting with some folks playing music): Μια κοπέλα με ρώτησε κάτι που δεν κατάλαβα. Είπα, “Δεν είμαι Έλληνας.” Είπε αυτή, “Δεν είσαι Έλληνας και παίζεις μπαγλαμά;” Εγώ: “Δεν είναι μπαγλαμάς! Τζουράς είναι!” Είπε “Συγνώμη”… [...]

Greek spelling is both wonderful and awful. It’s wonderful because, completely unlike English, if you see a word written down you know exactly how to pronounce it. It’s awful because knowing how to pronounce a word still leaves you lots of options for how to spell it. Today’s discovery is the verb “to use”: χρησιμοποιώ. [...]

I’ve got some kind of bizarro mental block going on with “Spain” in Greek. I confuse it with Israel and Japan. There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to [...]

I had a close encounter with rockstardom last night. A bloke from De Dijk (keyboardist, according to Nikos) was at Dionysos where I went for an after-dinner dinner, and it turns out he plays baglama and bouzouki also. Hellenophiles get everywhere, it seems…