Decoding.

 At an early age a frustration for me was my inability to tell the time – everyone else seemed to be able to do it. It seemed to me to be the badge of grown up-ness.

                                            

The first stage was for me to identify the numbers themselves. Above you see a clock face with Arabic numerals.  Now you may not recognize them at first but you can identify their values by using both their location and your time-telling skill. Incidentally it’s quite easy to remember these numbers using my method: the number 1 has one stroke, 2 has two strokes, and so on to number 5 which unhelpfully looks like a nought. Confusingly, the number 6 looks like a seven. :O Then the numbers 7 and 8 are the same symbol inverted.  Think of a soft drink to help you here: comparing the two, you get seven-up and the other is the 8! The 9 is recognizable as such, while the zero is a dot. That’s it, you’ve got it! 😊

So we have accomplished our number recognition, but there is a further stage to be completed and that is to interpret what each number represents in terms of its relation to the passage of the hour.                                  

Helping us do just that is a clock that was formerly used for Early Learners at The British Council Teaching Centre, Thessaloniki to help them tell the time in English. I love it.

As well as coping with the numbers, I was, when living in the Arab world, obliged to come to grips with the Arabic alphabet. As with all languages, you will reach the level of competence required to meet your daily needs. Beyond that it depends on the individual drive, interest, commitment, aptitude, etc. as to how much further you will progress. So I could go to the souq, greet people and ask for foodstuffs and their prices. At work I could converse with clients to learn their personal data required for the registration procedure at the Teaching Centres in both Sana’a and in Kuwait.

 But my language was at a basic level. On occasions, I would sound out the letters forming an unknown word and Z, who grew up in an area where the local Greek dialect was imbued with imported Turkish words, could recognize what this shared cognate meant. Great team work!

                                          

Note that above, the first column is on the right as writing in Arabic is a left-to-right affair.

In my youth, when studying English Literature, I noticed that some poems would be prefaced by extracts from Greek writing that had inspired the poet. This always intrigued me and I longed to be able to unlock this code, just as I longed to tell the time.  

                              

(This is a quotation from the Nobel Prize winner, Odysseus Elytis, wondering if loneliness feels the same to everyone everywhere.)

And, of course, it was my fate to come and live in Greece. Despite having attended some lessons and having a rudimentary awareness of the language, my first encounters with the language being spoken around me were quite disturbing. Spoken Greek was an inaccessible wall of unidentifiable bricks; a sea of sound with a continuum of waves that defied being broken into semantic units.  It took me months before from that wave continuum I could identify the general topic, and it took even longer for me to understand roughly what was being said about that topic. But, oh, the joy when it begins to make sense and when you can respond, even at a simple level. Decoding and communication achieved- yay!

I regularly do crosswords and sudoku which really are forms of decoding. In sudoku you use arithmetic hypotheses to complete the grid. The crossword clues will often deliberately try to lead you off the trail, just like a good detective mystery. The solving is so satisfying. 😊

 

 For years there has been one more code that has eluded me and that I have wanted to break. I’ve just embarked on a project to learn to decode what is to me a completely opaque system.

To be continued ..........?!!?!!

To be continued ……….. ?????