![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
argurotoxosOn Monday, we received our grades from the first Ancient Greek exam and spent the first hour of class going over our test. At one point, our professor was trying to emphasize the importance of accents and breathing marks. The word in question was ὁδός, which means 'road, path' and is properly transliterated as 'hodos'. However, it's the breathing mark (῾) over the word that marks the 'h' sound. Thus, if you ignore the diacritical marks, you would transliterate as 'odos', which is incorrect.
Our professor's way of expressing this? "If someone writing 'hodos' left out the 'h', I want to decapitate them."
It loses something without the delivery; I've never seen our professor anything but smiling and polite. Whether that makes it funnier or scarier is in the eyes of the beholder. (. . . and the youth approached, fingers stroking the edge of the blade with tender affection. Regarding the prone figure with a gentle smile, he said calmly, "And now, if you'll excuse me, sir, it's time for your decapitation.")
Another memorable quote, from when we were first learning how to conjugate nouns, was: "And given that the Greeks rarely talked to their apples, we will not worry about that [the vocative neuter case]."
The first time I sat in Roman History was good for professor quotes, too. "Meetings are a painful way of making friends . . . If you're lonely, have a meeting!"
Our professor's way of expressing this? "If someone writing 'hodos' left out the 'h', I want to decapitate them."
It loses something without the delivery; I've never seen our professor anything but smiling and polite. Whether that makes it funnier or scarier is in the eyes of the beholder. (. . . and the youth approached, fingers stroking the edge of the blade with tender affection. Regarding the prone figure with a gentle smile, he said calmly, "And now, if you'll excuse me, sir, it's time for your decapitation.")
Another memorable quote, from when we were first learning how to conjugate nouns, was: "And given that the Greeks rarely talked to their apples, we will not worry about that [the vocative neuter case]."
The first time I sat in Roman History was good for professor quotes, too. "Meetings are a painful way of making friends . . . If you're lonely, have a meeting!"
