Breakfast with Bella....




You know how I have been using 'Cat' as the standard noun to talk about cases? I will be using it throughout the semester, because the cat is the perfect creature and the perfect noun, and because it makes me happy just to think about it in Latin terms. The cat is female (there is gender for you), it is alive so it can possess a genitive, you can come 'with a cat' so it gets into the ablative, the 'cat is beautiful,' and 'the cat is coming/eating/sleeping in the toolshed' so it can get into the nominative, have a predicate or accompany intransitive verbs, I buy a lot of stuff 'for the cat' and give it 'to the cat' so there is your dative, I 'love the cat' 'feed the cat', and 'remember the cat', so it is also the object of my verbs and my affections, and...god willing, when we learn the plural number (=denoting not one but many cats) I will be thinking of slowly embracing my fate, that of the cat lady that owns 35 cats and feeds another 100 (until the animal control raids her house....)...I just wanted to share with you the fact that this proverbial Cat is real, her name is Bella (which is Latin for 'beautiful') and I have had her for 3 years now. She lives in Crete on my dad's farm, so she is semi-wild but with a very tender streak....I have been trying to get her a passport so that she can imigrate here (EU rules...argh!) but it is very expensive and I am running into a lot of trouble with the beaureocratic and corrupt Greek authorities (asking me for about 600 euros to expedite my business)....here is a pic of me and Bella in the farmhouse, and another one of my daughter (ok, she is actually my niece but I pretend she is my daughter) imitating Bella's pose. How does Latin relate to this? Well, the inspiration for Bella's name, for one. Also, and you might see this further along: Latin is a window into humanity and a certain affection for all living beings that are fragile in time...The Colosseum stands after 2, 000 years, but all of us, including Bella, will be dust in the wind long before the Colosseum collapses...hopefully, heaven looks something like Rome.... my coffee is growing cold! Laters,

Eleni