Greek was an exercise in making the familiar strange. Its alphabet mapped onto the Roman alphabet, but only partly so, and often letters did not sound how they looked – a rho (P) was not a P, and an eta (H) was not an H. Like Latin, it made use of conjugations and declensions, but there were a good deal more moods, tenses, and voices to keep track of. Its inventory of sounds seemed further from English than Latin’s did, and Robin kept struggling not to make Greek tones sound like Chinese tones.
