It’s all Greek to me…

We have been to 38 countries so far and in most of them (not the Asian countries) , the written language is based on the same character set. Our alphabet are Latin based and I can usually figure out enough to understand the words on a sign.

The Greek language words are familiar but the character set doesn’t match up. We have, of course, been using these characters in math , science and medicine all our lives, but we haven’t used them in our daily writing.

The sounds the letters make are all familiar, it’s just we are not used to those letters making those words.

For example, “Θέλω παγωτό”, is “I want ice cream” or “Thélo Pagotó”. I can sound it out if I do “Theta epsilon lambda omega” = “Thelo”, “Pi” “alpha”, “gamma”, “omicron”, “tau”, “omega”.

So where does the saying, “It’s all Greek to me” come from. It probably started with the early translating of ancient scripts and the Latin monks would encounter passages in Greek and would not be able to translate them. Instead they would copy the characters and put a note in the margin, “Graecum est, non legitur”, “It is Greek. It cannot be read”Later in 1599, the saying became popular to describe a lack of understanding, after Shakespeare used it in Julius Caesar, when the Cassius asked Casca about a conversation among conspirators. He didn’t understand the plans so told Caesar so by using the “It is Greek” metaphor. That has become the saying when we don’t understand what people are talking about.