LogFAQs > #919934161

COIN TOSS

B

You won't let Jonas ruin your good time so you just ignore anything in the range of Rorek IV's life.

Raven marvels at the selection, and with help from her English-to-Greek language guide, she asks the museum employee for assistance. Then with some help from you when the guide fails, she explains what she wishes to read.

The employee, with cloth gloves, carefully carries a very old tome over to the observation table. He then provides Raven with her own cotton gloves and she puts those on before slowly opening the book.

"Wow..." she marvels at the remarkably preserved pages. "This looks amazing!"

"Indeed," you say. "Now let's see... Oh well this is the preface, that's boring stuff."

Raven carefully turns the page.

"Oh okay, this might be something," you say. "This is essentially a census from ancient times. Let's see..."

You skim over the words, translating it as best you can from ancient Greek to modern English.

"Well obviously per any census, you have the column of names over here on the left, and then the numbers are in the Greek numerals over here. Adding this apostrophe essentially told you it was the number and not the letter."

"Oh, so by that logic, an alpha is one, beta is two, and so no?"

"Yes, until you get past theta. Then it's representing units of 10. Iota is 10, kappa is 20, and so on, until sigma. Sigma is 200, tau is 300, and so on until they used 'sampi' for 900."

"Sampi?"

"As a capital, it looks like if lambda had a third leg branching off the right. As lowercase, it looks like an archer's bo being held by two stick-man arms."

"Oh, yeah, I think I see that," she says. "Those must be total population values then."

"Yes, I'd think so, too. Okay, given this is the ancient Greek, you use the ancient phonetics of their alphabet. Alpha was an 'ah', like in 'father'. Beta was the B, like 'better'. Gamma was a hard G, that 'get' sound. Delta was D, Epsilon was short E like in 'pet'. Zeta was of course Z, like a 'zeh' or 'sdh'. Eta was the even shorter E, theta was T like 'top'.

"Iota could be both short I and long I, so the differences between 'light' and 'machine'. Kappa was obviously just a K, Lambda was L, Mu is M and Nu was N. Xi is X, Omicron was a short O like 'hot'. Pi was P, Sigma was both styles of S, such as... Well, 'styles' has both. Tau is T like at the end of 'hot', Upsilon is both types of U, as in 'loon' and 'ruse'. Phi was also P, but could have a P-H 'fff' sound.

"Chi was C as in 'cat', Psi was P-S as in 'laps', and Omega was an A-W like 'saw' and 'paw'."

"Yeah, that was in my language guide," Raven says. "It also has their modern uses."

"Well you should've told me that," you chuckle. "In that case, help me translate some of this."

Raven chuckles as she opens her guide book to the pronunciation guide.
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