Every Friday afternoon here at the Circ Desk there is usually some shelving to be done on our Hold Shelf, which receives hundreds of books daily from the Depository, Technical Processing, and various holds and recalls placed by the patrons. Often the day crew is able to shelve some of the new arrivals, but not all of them, leaving the job to us, the evening and weekend staff. Rather than allow the Hold Shelf to remain in a state of disarray, I like to get right on the case - not only does it keep us from having to worry about doing it Saturday morning, but it gives me a chance to take a little bit of a breather during what's a nine-hour day for me here on Fridays, between the job down in Modern Greek and the half-shift at Circulation. I've always found shelving or shelf-reading to be very relaxing - almost meditative, even - although it never ceases to infuriate me when I find books that have been misfiled (which is really way more often than it should be). Alphabetical order is one of those few things that separates us from the animals, people! When in doubt, sing the song...
Speaking of losing one's grasp on what was once old hat, during my day job we're finding that more and more of the Modern Greek cataloging departments around the country are becoming increasingly lax in their transliteration of breathing marks, an important feature of the Greek language that has been around for over 2,500 years. Words in Greek that begin with a vowel are supposed to be accompanied a mark over said vowel (or, in the case of a diphthong, the second letter of that diphthong) indicating to the reader as to whether he or she should aspirate the vowel - that is, pronounce it with an initial "h" - or not. With an "h" is called rough breathing; without is called smooth breathing. It's the reason that even though the word in the Greek for blood is αιμα, its English derivative hematology starts with an "h", as the initial diphthong comes with a rough breathing mark.
Although not all Greek dialects worried about the difference between rough and smooth breathing, the Attics were obsessed with it, up to the point that they originally invented the letter eta (which not coincidentally in its capital form looks like our "H") to indicate where rough breathing was called for. As time went on, however, most Hellenists agree that the majority of Greek-speakers ceased making the distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated initial vowels, although the Greeks faithfully preserved these marks in writing well into the modern era and in Greece were only eliminated in the 1980's by a special Presidential decree. Only now are we seeing the results of that break in the orthographic tradition, with a generation of Greeks who never had to worry about breathing marks entering the ranks of professional academia. And although when I teach Ancient Greek I myself employ the Modern Greek pronunciation and tell my students not to sweat the difference between rough and smooth breathing, I am saddened by the loss nevertheless.
But in Cataloging it's more than just a matter of nostalgia. Even though in Greek the words were always interfiled in dictionaries and lexica regardless of aspiration, when said words are transliterated into English (according to the standards set by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association; in Greece and elsewhere abroad the standards are different, and no longer include transliterating rough breathing with an "h") the ones beginning with rough breathing all end up filed under "h". This means that a cataloger in America still must know where the rough breathing should be, even if his or her counterpart in Greece or anywhere else in the world doesn't; if not, the item in question will be misfiled in the various indices, which can be a big problem if the index in question is part of a shared database like OCLC. And again, any kind of misfiling makes me see red.
I suspect, however, that ultimately we're going to lose this battle to maintain the distinction. At some point a critical mass of catalogers here in the States who are untrained in the matter of breathing marks will be reached and the standards will be changed. Already there are cracks in the wall of tradition: even though the letter rho was always written with a rough breathing mark when it began a Greek word - hence the island of Rhodes - the convention to transliterate it as "rh" is observed spottily at best these days. It's strange to think that a tradition as old as the Parthenon will likely die within my life time. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess!
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