Spring Semester

Today is our first day of spring semester, and it has been interesting.  I've only had two classes today, which is nice, but I'm not looking forward to having an 8:00 AM class every single day.  Well, I might.  My history professor seems cool enough, so I might be looking forward to his class.  The other class I had today was the Greek Epic - in other words, Homer.  This is going to be a challenge and a half.

I'm definitely not looking forward to his 18-page final paper, though.  The last time I had a long paper, it was 10-15 pages for an honors class last semester, and I had 12 pages counting the bibliography (with a large-ish 12-point font... IT'S IN THE PAGE RANGE, OKAY).  This, on the other hand, is a History 101 course.  I understand that the 101 portion is designed to help the students with their writing, but I'm not sure if I can come up with 18 pages about the sexual revolution and/ or the LGBTQ+ movement in the 1960s.  Those are topics I like, but still - Masau'u and other factors of Puebloan death mythology and their influence on Blood Meridian and its character of the Judge was also an interesting topic for me, but I could still only come up with eleven double-spaced pages on the topic.  To be fair, there is probably more up-to-date literature about the sexual revolution and/ or the LGBTQ+ movement in the 1960s... and I can probably read it all the way through... (I didn't even finish Blood Meridian. Does that make me a bad Honors student?)

Anyhow, the other class I had today was The Greek Epic - we're translating The Odyssey from its original Greek.  Greek is my fun-challenge course (except for the verbs), but apparently Homer is one of the more difficult writers to translate, especially coming from intermediate Greek that focused mainly on the Attic dialect. The reason for this will take a bit of explaining.
So, basically, there are a few major dialects of Greek - Ionic and Aeolic are two of them.  I'm not sure where Ionic was dominantly spoken - I assume that it was more on the mainland of what we now call Greece, because Attic (from Athens) is a sub-dialect of that.  Aeolic is more from the coast of what we call Turkey; it is, strictly speaking, the same language, but there are several differences in the rules for syntax and verbs.  In The Odyssey, the Ionic and Aeolic styles are all jumbled up into lines that fit the meter.  Since we're not actually sure who wrote the work down, it's easy to think that certain books of The Odyssey could be more dominantly Ionic and others could tend towards Aeolic - but it's not like that at all.  Ionic rules and Aeolic rules are mish-mashed together into something that fits the meter.  That's going to be a royal pain in the butt for me, because I've only recently gotten the hang of all the Attic verb indicators - the letters that indicate that a verb is imperfect or perfect or aorist - and now I'm reading Homer, who doesn't actually use any of those.  Well, maybe I shouldn't throw away my Greek notes and textbooks yet - I might need them.

Tomorrow I have two honors classes (one involves yarn and one involves King Arthur, so that should be fun) and Journalism, which should not be fun because its textbook is expensive.

Anyway, I'll write again on Friday.