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.