Silly sayings for grammatical rules

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Matthew Longhorn
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Jun 19, 2020 9:32 am

Silly sayings for grammatical rules

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

I tend to use silly sayings when helping people remember Greek grammatical rules - typically based of animals
e.g. to understand when a αυ is translated as av rather than af I tell them that αυ followed by a πoodle, θinking τurtle, or a κrazy χat on an ξylophone it is translated as af. The first letters of each of the nouns telling them that when that letter follows αυ, the pronunciation changes.
Similarly, the sigma is a snake swallowing νaughty δentals το get across that when a sigma is attached to a nu or a dental stop then the dental drops out

For the square of stops I use
πoodles βery φrequently are ψichotic (poodles very frequently are psychotic)
κats γo χrazy on ξylophones (cats go crazy on xylophones)
τurtles δont θink ζebras are σtripy (turtles don't think zebra's are stripy - including the zeta here as it changes in the same way)

Does anyone have any that would be useful for Hebrew? The Hey likes to hide is one that comes to mind, but obviously not something I have given proper thought to at this point
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