All Greek to me

This week saw my first New Testament Greek lesson. There were about 50 of us intrepid early risers gathered in Lecture Room 2 at 8.30 on Monday morning, the rest of our cohort having decided (possibly wisely) to take the extra hour in bed, rather than get up to do a purely optional course.

And, by the way, my journey felt even more of an adventure on Monday morning, thanks to a fabulously eccentric (award for understatement of the century) man on the Victoria Line Tube train.  He was wearing what was clearly a home-made cone hat made of foil and coke cans and brandishing a stick wrapped in the same kind of thing. I was only on the train for 4 stops or so but in that time he had managed to hold forth, in a high-pitched, slightly odd voice, about what "space" was and how the doors aren't just closing on the train but they are closing to heaven and we're all too late. As I got off at Victoria, he was just starting on a monologue about what peoples' eyes were doing.
The more time I spend on the Tube, the more I think that all of human life is there. Paradise for a people-watcher like me but also a little bit sad to think about the inevitable story of decline behind that man and so many like him.

But I digress.... Back to Greek.

I'm not afraid to admit that I was a bit nervous about starting NT Greek. I mean, it has a whole other alphabet as well as mysterious things called "breathings", before you even get to making the words and trying to work out what they mean.

Perhaps bizarrely, however, I loved the class and am looking forward to going to the next one.

Reflecting a bit on why I loved it so much, I have come up with the following theories:

1. I'm a linguist - I love language. I did a French degree with linguistics and history of French thrown in for good measure when I first went to university. So this, in many ways, feels like home turf.

2. Related to (1) - all the other academic lectures so far have been excellent but, as a languages student and musician, my subjects are, by their nature, technical rather than abstract - and the lectures have been about abstract concepts. Brilliantly taught and delivered and I'm picking things up more and more quickly but abstract nonetheless and I feel as though I have to learn a whole new language to even half-understand some of the big ideas we are grappling with. Going back to the relatively simple task of learning letters and names and punctuation/pronunciation marks felt like putting on a comfy pair of slippers.

3. I love change and new things. This is very new and I enjoyed it for novelty's sake if nothing else.

So I will look forward to next Monday morning, especially if we get entertainment on the Tube beforehand again, and in the meantime will be swotting up on the difference between my Alphas and Omegas, my thetas and my zetas....