Day 7 | Numbers

Lets start with the good news.  The lovely people at Greektionary kindly put my blog on their site with a little blurb; this has surely made the road less lonely.  This is a really good site for language resources and well worth a visit.  The bad news: I'm off to Berlin tonight which means I'll be both feet out of the virtual realm for several days.  Anyway, administration aside lets get on with the word-play.


Today I'm focusing on the numbers.  I found this took several hours to really get these to stick in sequence so I strongly advise concentrating on the first 10 digits in one session if you really want this to remain memorable.  Lets have a crack at least.  

 

1	ένα	ehnah
2	δύο	theeoh
3	τρία	treeah
4	τέσσερα	tehsserah
5	πέντε	pendeh
6	έζι	ehxee
7	επτά	eptah
8	οκτώ	oktoh
9	εννέα	enneeah
10	δέκα	thehkah

Short and sweet but nevertheless can be tricky to make it remain in the membrane (advise you to go over this time and time again; like I did for the past 2 hours!).  Couple of points.  Whilst 4 looks like it should be spoken as tehsserah it actually sounds like it begins with a d.  More strangely though is 7 which seems to divide opinion around whether this is articulated as eptah (as the spelling suggests) or eftah.  I'm still none the wiser which way to go on this one, please advise.

Looking at the larger numbers it seems on paper that these are much more simple to memorise than the English equivalent.  3, 13, 23 and 33 for example are τρία, δεκατρια, εικοσι τρια, τριαντα τρια (see the pattern emerging?).  You're just adding the the three to the end of the ten, twenty and thirty.  None of that teen number nonsense we have in English.  Anyway, for my penny's worth, just concentrate on the 1-10 and we can deal with the bigger numbers in a later post!  


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