All the Letters are Different Colours

Learning Ancient Greek when you have Synaesthesia

Χαιρετε! That word, that opening, means ‘greetings’ in Ancient Greek. I do notice that most of the letters I’ve read from Greeks themselves often use the infinitive. I should probably start my newsletters with ‘To readers, friends, family, χαιρειν. Today’s post is all about Ancient Greek, learning it, and what it’s like to learn it when you have synaesthesia. There will be smatterings of Greek words and letters, but if you don’t know Greek, fear not! There won’t be many, and hopefully it’ll be interesting anyway.

Let’s start with synaesthesia (or synesthesia, if you’re in the States). It’s a strange, not-very-well-understood condition that comes from (we think) activities in the brain in utero, when the connections between the different areas that are supposed to process senses get pruned. We start off with a lot of connections, and they are gradually whittled down so that when we see, that’s processed in the visual cortex, and when we smell, that’s handled by the bit that does scent.

Except in synaesthetes, this seems not to happen, or happen unreliably. Most commonly, synaesthetes end up with extra senses being routed through vision. Sometimes, though, people get more unusual effects, being able to taste words or colours. My own synaesthesia is colour-based. I see sounds, see tastes occasionally, but the most common effect for me is seeing letters and numbers in colour.

Synaesthesia is slightly controversial. Nobody thought it was a thing for a long time. We just developed associations, apparently, and the reason why we saw letters in colour was because we had played with coloured fridge magnets as kids and simply came to connect the two together. I was skeptical when I first read this, because I was pretty sure although we had fridge magnets, they didn’t always correspond to how I saw letters. I can recall being annoyed as a young child at a coloured alphabet on the wall of our classroom where the R was red and I was absolutely sure that R was not red. It’s brown.

The big test of this is pretty obvious: What happens if a synaesthete learns a language with another alphabet?

Right now, I work with and study Ancient Greek. In the past, I’ve learnt a little bit of Hebrew and Russian. All of these use different alphabets. Hebrew is an alphabet of square-jawed letters that align themselves neatly in lines, mostly green and brown. Russian, on the other hand, is very clicky. All those spiky determined letters, dark colours, as brightly coloured as the Latin alphabet.

Greek, though, Greek was different.

Greek is golden. Perhaps because it’s full of circular forms, all those omicrons and omegas and thetas. This is just how I perceive the language overall, of course. Individual letters have their own colours, but the overall appearance of the language, when I read it, is gold.

Pause, a moment. Synaesthesia is a highly personal thing. Although there are common patterns, not everybody shares them. Meeting another synaesthete can be strange: I see A as white, but they see it as red. People without synaesthesia see it as whatever colour the font is, presumably. In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, many of the descriptions carry synaesthetic overtones. He repeatedly refers to ‘O’ as pink. I find this very weird: ‘O’ is very obviously yellow, but entirely different from ‘0’, which is white.

The colours seem to give me a bit of an advantage in learning. I’ve always been quite good at spelling, and this seems to be related to seeing words as strings of colour. Not only that, though. Some letters are more ‘powerful’ than others. That’s the only way I can describe it. Words have an overall quality to them, dictated by the dominant letters and their colours. E, in English, and Ε in Greek are both determinedly orange. G is also a dominant letter, so the word ‘Greek’ in English is mostly green and orange. In Greek, though, ἐλλαδ-, is quite different. There is the orange Ε, overlooking the tree-like black-brown lambdas, and the silvery δ at the end, but the epsilon must fight it out with the alpha, right there in the middle, creating a striped effect.

Letters, words, colours, meaning, all collide in a complex melange. δεκα is ten in Greek. The number 10 to me is deep black and yellow. It’s a strange thing 1 does to 0 that it turns it yellow. So the number 10 resembles a bee, while the word in English is mostly brown and orange and grey (n is usually grey), and in Greek, the orange ε and red κ battle for supremacy.

It can be useful, however. The word ‘genitive’ is green but the genitive plural, in Greek, is a uniform ων. That’s two different shades of red, the paler lower-case omega and the bright crimson ν. I know to look for it, the sudden transition of a genitive absolute in the plural, or if in the singular masculine, yellow and white ου. In the feminine, that η is grey in colour but sounds orange. I search for familiar colours that bounce off the page and rearrange themselves into meaning somewhere between the colours and the sounds.

What does this mean for reading from papyri? Well, that’s hard. Reading papyri is hard if you have synaesthesia or not. Handwriting, the tough nature of a person painting ink across a surface that while pretty good for receiving it, is not perfect. I hunt for black lambdas, which often look very much like white alphas. Like everyone, I prefer a practiced scribe than a writer battling with an unfamiliar task and a language that very often isn’t their first.

All this has meant learning languages is a fascinating exploration of different ways to put colour on the page. Greek is unusual that its alphabet is so bright, so colourful. Those omicrons are common to both English and Greek, but then there’s the rich orange and then red of ξ and ζ and the strange way that omega is a really bright, glittering yellow when capitalised Ω but a subtle red ω when it’s lower-case. I have to remember that for reading papyri or epigraphy in all-caps. When I’m hunting for those red genitives, they suddenly transform into golden-greys.

It leaves me wondering, though, having explored Greek in such depth, whether other languages using different alphabets would present new colours and experiences? Learning languages, especially as you get older, is incredibly hard. Memory palaces are supposed to be the way to go, and I’ve seen so many different techniques. Mine is built into my brain, although admittedly sometimes flawed, and I’ve been using it to compensate for that loss of rote memory that happens as you hit middle-age.

It has other funny side effects. The grey-orange of the feminine means I see anything female associated with Greek as the same grey-orange. Men, on the other hand, carry with them shades of yellow. And that mysterious neuter gender, applying almost exclusively to things? Since it so often follows the masculine pattern, it is often yellow too, but with the brown tinge of the τ cheerfully tagging along. It makes me wonder, though, whether any of the Greeks who wrote for the thousand or so years when it was an active language, saw their language in colour, and what they made of it. I had no idea I was a synaesthete, and that other people didn’t see all this stuff in glorious technicolour, until I saw a documentary in my teens. Now, in my head, I imagine a scribe somewhere in an agora in Egypt (Egypt is orange, by the way, the colour of deserts and sand, how appropriate), sitting their plying his trade with the advantage of seeing his written world in his own personal coloured universe.