I’ve got some kind of bizarro mental block going on with “Spain” in Greek. I confuse it with Israel and Japan.

There are reasons, but they’re kind complicated. First off, it’s pronounced roughly “IspanEEa”, which I visualise as “Ispania” (yup, visualising the Greek sounds in Latin letters, you can see where this is going to go wrong). And if I haven’t had my morning coffee, Ισραήλ just looks too similar. Getting to Japan depends on two additional little problems: I have trouble remembering that it’s spelled with omega instead of omicron, and the font our textbook uses makes sigma, omicron and alpha all look really similar, especially before pi. So I can see Ισπανία and read Ιαπονία which really should be Ιαπωνία.

Also I, like several of my classmates, have a tendency to read ρολόι (roloi, watch or clock) as poli (very), or on a bad day when my accent slips, pouli (πουλί? however it’s spelled, it makes everyone laugh). “Πόσο κάνει τον πουλί σου, Παυλο;”

(Whatever was wrong with Firefox and Greek input seems to have fixed itself. Maybe it was the KDE updates the other day?)