Saturday, March 16, 2013

Caturday ~ feline language

This kitten is learning to speak, and it sounds like Greek to me.  When I was about ten years old, a young man in my neighborhood was sitting outside in the sun learning Greek.  I was curious, so he taught me the Greek alphabet.  I memorized all 24 letters as easily as I had learned the English letters a few years earlier:  "Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega."  Learning it was fun and relatively easy.

That memory work came in handy twenty years later when I took Greek in college and later in seminary when I studied Greek again because the New Testament was originally written in Greek.  Learning early is key, and I can still rattle off this Greek alphabet more than six decades after memorizing it.

I found the cute little kitten photo online earlier this week and was surprised yesterday to find two more cats saying "mu" — or should that be spelled "mew"?

Do you think these two are a bit nerdy, as the artist asserts?  Or are they simply speaking Greek?

3 comments:

Helen's Book Blog said...

Learning early is definitely the key!

Ginnie said...

Interesting post. My memory and my spelling have become atrocious but I can still reel off words to songs that I learned in the 40's and 50's !!

Bonnie Jacobs said...

Born in 1940, I learned the Greek alphabet sometime around 1950. We're in the same boat, Ginnie.