(no subject)

You know, I really liked my professor of Latin and Greek back at my first college. She was witty, engaging, helpful, tolerant without being a pushover, and all around a lot of fun to have class with.

But I remember the absolute blank confusion of when I hit third declension in that class, and how it never really cleared up. Oh, I learned to sort of recognize the endings on the fly, and run with them, but could I look at a noun and figure out which of the patterns it fit? Hell no. It was a moment of frustration at the sheer incomprehensible capriciousness of Greek that I never quite got over, in that class.

Today we covered third declension in class, from a linguistic standpoint, with the instructor running through all the various things going on there (intervocalic sigma gets dropped, dental stops do too when slapped next to a sigma, various vowels turn into others when unexpectedly slapped together), and...suddenly, it all makes sense.

"People divide it up into eight subgroups," he said, "but it's not. It's just one declension following certain rules when the endings meet the roots." And...he's completely right. It's just one damn pattern! (A few irregular nominatives aside, and allowing for M/F being slightly different from N, as usual.) Know the nominative and genitive singular, and the basic pattern, and you can run through the whole damn thing with appropriate phonemes kicking each other out of the place or merging together, with none of this subgroup silliness.

I wish I'd known this the last time I took Greek. Would've made things a lot easier.