M is for Apple

After I had been in England for around three years, one day I realised that I had started thinking in English. This came as a big surprise to me. I was no longer thinking in Greek and then speaking in English, roughly translating the meaning of what I wanted to say. And even more, when I was alone just thinking without the need to speak to anyone, I was now thinking to myself in English. This really posed a few problems to me. My English was not as good as my Greek and will never be, so my thoughts in English were simpler and more basic. Also I noticed, very wearingly, that sometimes my thoughts in English took the form of stereotypical phrases you hear in Hollywood movies. These kind of words would have never come out of my mind or my mouth had I been thinking and speaking in Greek. When I realised that, I tried to console myself by thinking that this might open some opportunities to me to think and say things that would not have come naturally to me otherwise. 

Greek language is very different to the English, not just in regards to the alphabet, grammar and overall structure, but to the quality of the words. By quality I mean the nature of the words and the way they carry their meaning and by no means do I want to make a comparison regarding their significance. Most Greek words are more or less always made up from ancient words, so that on top of their meaning they carry a couple of other ones with them. For example the word for happiness is Ευτυχία    which also means happiness in Greek. But it is made up of two small words ευ and τύχη which mean correspondingly good and luck. So that when you say you are feeling happy you are also kind of saying that you are having a spell of good luck. Some other words are even more loaded with meaning  like the word nostalgia, Νοσταλγία, which like in English means a kind of longing. It can refer to the past, to a place or a person. It is made up of two words νόστος and άλγος. The first refers to the longing to return home after a very long journey and period of absence, I guess a kind of homesickness, which was used by Homer to describe Odysseus' feeling for his home island and his wife throughout the years he was away. And the second word means pain. So the pain you feel from your longing to return. What I am getting at with this I guess, is that many words in Greek are charged with a very heavy and layered meaning, so that often the language has a very powerful and dramatic weight to it, even if you are just describing to someone how to make a good cup of coffee. 

English language has to me a very light feeling to it. It flows very easily and you can speak about something quite generally, avoiding to be very specific if you chose to. I am sure that scholars of the English language will jump up here and talk about the roots of the language and how complicated it actually is. That might be true, but in effect it is an easy language to speak (maybe not so to master) and it is no coincidence that it is spoken by a vast number of people around the world. This fact together with the fact that my knowledge of the language and its roots is basic, freed me and led me to write and say things that I would have never dreamed to say in Greek. I would have never dreamt or dared in my wildest dreams for example to write this blog in Greek. I would have written other things but never this. It is a very scary thought: I think and live my life in a way that is simpler, easier and freer, but which is not as precise, as meaningful or as natural to me as it could be. Nevertheless I continue to do it, presumably because it offers me those things or perhaps because I no longer have a choice. Which is in fact the case, as around five years after my arrival to England I also started to dream in English.   

So I started to think what will happen to Aretousa and her understanding of the two languages. At the moment she makes a patchwork out of them, choosing I think, the easiest sounding word from each language. Apparently young children can learn up to three or even more languages when they are that young if they are exposed to them enough. However much I have been consumed by the English language, when I see some capital letters that exist in both languages in isolation, like the letters A, M, N, O and some others, my first response is to think of the word we learned as kids at school beginning with that letter. For the letter A for example, I immediately think of Horse which is άλογο in Greek, a word starting with an A. And when I see an M immediately I think of Apple, which is μήλο, a word starting with an M in Greek. Aretousa also has started to learn these very simple first words in Greek, so I decided to make her a Greek alphabet and make each letter with a few images inside it of the simple word which starts with it. I recently saw on a friend's blog some really great letters and my whole plan of the alphabet came back to me. We started with the letter M and the drawings of the apples. I was hoping for something quite stylistic with maybe a few colours, including red and green, but Aretousa participated forcefully and so below are the results of our collaboration for the letter M standing for Apple.