Here we come to the fourth and final of my blog posts about my MBA class trip to Istanbul and Athens. It was a great trip – and I hope an interesting series of posts. It’s a trip I would definitely re-visit if given the chance.
In Athens, as in Istanbul, I was interested in more than just the sights and artifacts of a foreign land. I was interested in language and culture. Call it a weakness. Little did I know that plunging into Greek was going to give me a lesson in some of the particulars of linguistics that I’d read about in a theoretical sense but had yet to put into action. (That said, I’m going to be getting into some funky-nerdy language details in this post.)
Greek, I soon realized, was going to be both easier and harder for me to pick up on than Turkish. Easier because it is a European language that has heavily influenced English (we use all kinds of Greek prefixes and suffixes). Harder because it uses an entirely different alphabet to the one I am used to using. (It is perhaps worth noting, at this point, that the word alphabet itself we owe to Greek. It’s a portmanteau of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. But then you probably already knew that.) Continue reading
