ἐγὼ δ' εὐθὺς ἐποίησα τὸν ψιττακόν .

Greek Learning Greek
1

I am a bit mystified by this last sentence of the chapter on the parrot in Rouse’s Greek Boy. I’ve got the hardcopy by Anne Mahoney. There is a footnote that says ὅρα τὸ μέλος ὑπὸ τῷ κεφαλαίῳ ψιττακός ἐν τοῖς παρέργοις which I take to mean "See the song under the heading “parrot” in the appendices. In the PDF the note refers the reader to page 129, if I have correctly understood the Greek, which contains the song. One translation I saw gave “I celebrated the parrot right away” which made absolutely no sense at all to me. If I translate literally as “I did the parrot”, then I suppose that could mean that the boy immediatly sang his little ditty. Have I understood this correctly?

2

I made the song named “the parrot”

3

Thanks for the confirmation, Joel. I was really scratching my head over it.

4

When I was first trying to pick up Greek, I spent a lot of time reading the Gospel of Mark and Anabasis with a translation by the side, reading Plato with a dictionary and grammar, and reading Greek Boy without any help but the vocabulary in the back. I think I learned a lot from reading Greek Boy all those times (I had to repeat each story dozens of times, trying to pick up what I could each time through) trying to avoid English interference. There isn’t much Greek that works for that sort of thing at an early level. It took me years to get to a place where I could do that with real authors. So Greek Boy is a unique resource as far as that goes. For early translation/dictionary practice, something like Colson’s (sp?) Reader probably has fewer landmines. That’s just my opinion, anyway. Rouse was a unique educator, and it’s tremendous fun to read Greek Boy to kids, and teach them his various songs.

By the way, here is a usage from Herodotus, that could also be what Rouse was thinking of here:

μετὰ δὲ γυναῖκας ἔχων δύο διξὰς ἱστίας οἴκεε, ποιέων οὐδαμῶς Σπαρτιητικά

“not acting at all like a Spartan” or more lit. “not acting at all the Spartan”

So maybe this could be: “I acted the parrot”

5

Thank you for that. When I took up Greek again after so many years of neglect, I thought I could just plunge into ancient authors with prodigious use of a lexicon and a reference grammar. I did not appreciate sufficiently the value of made-up Greek. Now I do. I would like to read Colson’s Stories and Legends later.