Keyboard Conundrums

Ah, vocabulary. If I didn't have to spend so much time memorizing it, I would probably like it much more than I do now. Although I actually do kind of like vocab. Especially since I study ancient languages – I enjoy learning new words in English by learning Greek and Latin. Or learning how to pretend I know what some English words mean by uncovering their classical language roots. And I can play with the words and use them in writing. Or name blogs after them.

There's this awesome online flashcard website that I was introduced to in eighth grade. Since then, it's gotten me through four years of high school Latin and now nearly a semester of college Greek. Typing in my Latin flashcards was pretty easy – I just had to figure out how to do a macron (this thing: ¯), and I knew everything else already. Helps that English uses the Roman alphabet.

Greek, however, does not use the Roman alphabet. The Greeks came before the Romans, and they, surprisingly enough, used the Greek alphabet (fun fact: the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta). So learning Greek meant learning the Greek alphabet – and for my flashcards, it meant learning how to type the Greek alphabet.

There's a handy little setting my computer has that lets me flip back and forth between different keyboards. That is, it makes the keys I press put out different characters. I have three keyboards I regularly use. There's your standard US keyboard, which I'm typing with now, the US extended keyboard, which I use to get the macron, and the Greek Polytonic keyboard, which I use to type Greek.

The problem is that I'll be typing along with my Greek keyboard, and then I have to go look something up. So I open up the Internet and type "google" or some such thing into the address bar. But instead of "google," I get this:

γοογλε.

Gah.

Thankfully, Google knows how to search for itself in Greek. But there are a lot of things it doesn't know how to search for when you accidentally search in the wrong alphabet. Plus it messes me up sometimes when I switch back to typing English, because I try to type where the Greek letters are instead of where the English letters are.

No, this doesn't really have a point. I just find myself accidentally typing in Greek sometimes. Ανδ τηατ δοεσν᾽τ μακε α λοτ οφ σενσε. Οη ςελλ. Τηατ᾽σ λιφε, Ι γθεσσ.