In Defense of Omicron

An inscription. Altes Museum, Berlin.

It was my mother who first taught me the Greek alphabet. I don't know how or why she knew it, because she didn't know the language itself, but she knew the letterforms and their names, and taught them to me when I was still quite small. We used to chant the alphabet, just as children do when learning the Roman one; alpha, beta, gamma, delta, zeta, eta, theta... and I heard her voice again when I sat down in my first ancient Greek class in university and the professor presented us with the alphabet to be learned for the next day. There was something about the letterforms that obsessed me then, and continues to obsess me now: to me, they are extremely beautiful and balanced, whether carved in an inscription, or playfully scattered around the heads of characters on a vase, or written by hand in script in my notebook. I like making these forms. They can be seen, of course, as a code that my mind used to translate laboriously, but now does quickly, into sounds and their equivalent Roman letters, but I don't want to see them as a code, but solely as their own identity. For some reason, I just like being around them, having them in my life.

Pages of Aristotle, from a monastery library in Meteora.

I don't remember much of my ancient Greek, but a pandemic project has been to study some of the modern language. When we made our first trip to Greece, I was completely engrossed in sounding out all the Modern Greek signage; and at ancient archaeological sites, I would spend a lot of time looking at bits of inscriptions and was thrilled when I could actually understand a name or a word, but frustrated that I couldn't communicate much at all. Now I do at least one lesson a day on Duolingo, often two. My first uninterrupted "streak" ended after 200 days or so when, somehow, I simply forgot; today will be day 320 of the next streak. As I wrote earlier in the pandemic, it's a lazy and not terribly effective way to study a language if you really want to become fluent; I still believe you've got to put in the hard and boring work of memorizing conjugations and lists and grammatical rules, and I haven't done much of that. But I know a lot more than I did when I started, even if I'll still be tongue-tied if we ever make it to Greece again. I'd be a lot faster now at knowing what I was looking at in signage, be able to read a menu, ask some questions, be polite, but I'm not sure how much useful material I've actually learned, and very much doubt I'd understand much of what was said to me, at least at first.

What has kept me at it, I think, is this strange desire to be in the presence of those ancient letters every day and live in their world, which is not the world of Roman letters, is not at all English or French or German -- though those languages all owe a great debt to Greek -- but a set of symbols, descended from the alphabet of the seafaring Phoenicians, that have been used to write the Greek language since the 8th or 9th century B.C. That, alone, is incredible to me.

The numbers, in my notebook.

Obviously these letters have been used to represent a lot of things over the years, especially in mathematics and science. And now, we've got virus variants named for Greek letters, so that geographical places can avoid the stigma of attachment, and subsequent blame. I wasn't too upset about Alpha, or Delta -- both of which are overused letters in fraternity names, and therefore seemed like fair game -- but Omicron? Omicron rather upset me. I like the word itself, and am very fond of the letter, which is so...round, simple, elemental. It's one of the few letters of the Greek alphabet that remained entirely unchanged in the Roman, precisely because of that simplicity and the universal necessity of its sound.

I had better steel myself: we're probably in for a slew of variants, and Greek variant names. For me, though, omicron will remain first and foremost a letter, a sound, and a form: the universal circle. Something beautiful, written by human hands, almost forever.

 

Comments

[Edward Yankie]

For every Star Trek nerd, and I imagine for our mutual friend Jane also, it makes us think of Omicron Ceti 3, the planet that makes Spock become emotional and Jim Kirk ready to abandon his ship.

"I'm not going back, Jim!"

[Siona van Dijk]

Only that I love your handwriting in Greek. Such a lineage in those tracings.

[Julia]

I feel the same about Hebrew.
I began studying the alphabet after a business trip to Tel Aviv when I returned home laden with books on Judaism, Israeli history and politics, and wanted to leave my then-life to live on a kibbutz.
I once saw a front page of some magazine or other, whose headline was: When Israel was a child I loved him", now that Israel has grown up I'm not so enamoured...
Anyway, I've been with you for fifteen years, since I first fled to France as a mouse. I'm back again as a cancer survivor.
late-night ramblings... apologies

[Roderick Robinson]

I always felt that British Hellenophiles were showing off. Greek's a foreign language with a double difficulty: got to learn the alphabet first. Then there are the myths with their many sickening methods of putting people to death. Plus the huge gulf between modern and ancient Greek (says he, coveniently forgetting the impenetrability of Beowulf). And the fact that modern Greece plays only a modest role in the aspirations of the EU; do I have to understand its politics? British Hellenophiles, though not rich, all seemed "comfortable" (an undefinable adjective that nevertheless plays the role of mortar in the brick-built structure that is the British middle class). If it hadn't been for James Joyce and, to a lesser degreee, Richard Strauss, I'd know even less about Ελλάς than I do. It just wasn't my intellectual homestead

Familiarity with a foreign language in an increasingly monoglot world seemed essential. Proof that one had been prepared to put in the hours towards a sense of community, however fractional. In 1972 the publishing company I worked for offered free language tuition during the working day and you can guess what decision I made. But it would represent steps taken towards Marguerite Duras not Racine, Jacques Chirac not Charlemagne, understanding the threat from the New Right rather than the Albigensian Heresy.

The magazine I edited was sold and the new location was an hour's drive away. Because I liked to get in early my working day more closely corresponded with that of France, an hour ahead. Each morning I listened to France Inter's morning news magazine on the car radio.

And discovered a terrible risk. French politicians (and especially those of the Right - this was the heyday of Jean-Marie le Pen) did not speak like the man selling cerises in the street market at Clermont l'Hérault. Two-hundred words per minute became 60 wpm. The syntax, though still complex, was less idiomatic. The sentiments less extreme, more humane. The vocabulary almost shrunken. As a debutante in French-language-speaking I found myself loving this new and unexpected clarity. Revelling in it to the point where I came perilously close to accepting what was said was the truth. So beware. Greece is a real rag-tag and bobtail of political beliefs; remember The Colonels in Z. That clear speech may well be the language of the demagogue.

I fear I got off the point. Envy was probably the reason.