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”… και έφυγε.

That is: A girl asked me something which I didn’t understand. I said, “I’m not Greek.” She said, “You’re not Greek and you play baglamas?” Me: “It’s not a bagmalas! It’s a tzouras!” She said “Sorry”… and left.

It’s a conversation, of a sort, right?

[Any correct spelling in the Greek portion of this post was made possible by the kind intervention of Olga.]

Could have just been Olga objecting I suppose.

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. Third person singular (present) that’s χρησιμοποιεί, which has the distinction of containing almost all the ways to spell /i/ (the vowel of English “street”): η, ι, οι, and ει. It’s only missing υ, and yes folks, that means there are five ways to spell that one sound.

Dutch: I keep my money in a “bank”; You sit on a “bank” to watch tv (couch). Not the same.

Greek: I (could, if I were in Greece) keep my money in a “τράπεζα”. You eat dinner at the “τραπέζι” (table). Not the same.

(Yes, the last one isn’t actually lexical ambiguity. So sue me. Also, Micha tells me that German has the first three: financial institution, ground abutting a river, and bench. Whee!)

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 go wrong). And if I haven’t had my morning coffee, Ισραήλ just looks too similar. Getting to Japan depends on two additional little problems: I have trouble remembering that it’s spelled with omega instead of omicron, and the font our textbook uses makes sigma, omicron and alpha all look really similar, especially before pi. So I can see Ισπανία and read Ιαπονία which really should be Ιαπωνία.

Also I, like several of my classmates, have a tendency to read ρολόι (roloi, watch or clock) as poli (very), or on a bad day when my accent slips, pouli (πουλί? however it’s spelled, it makes everyone laugh). “Πόσο κάνει τον πουλί σου, Παυλο;”

(Whatever was wrong with Firefox and Greek input seems to have fixed itself. Maybe it was the KDE updates the other day?)

What’s that to be excited about, and what is “in the wild”? Well, it means it was

• spoken by someone I don’t know well,
• in a context where many different sentences could have been expected, and
• understood compositionally, word-by-word, not by pattern matching on things I recognise.

Which means it’s happening! Rock it with the language faculty!