Hippocratic Oath

I've been learning ancient Greek lately.  Just the other day I came across a famous quote attributed to Hippocrates: "Life is short,  medical art is long,  crisis is quick,  experiment is risky, judgement is hard."

My problem with Greek is that the small letters are hard to read! (That wasn't such a problem when I was younger.) When a word starts with a vowel, it either has a single start quote (like an apostrophe) over the vowel, or a single end quote.  If it's a start quote it's a regular vowel, but if it's an end quote it corresponds to a word that starts with "H" in the Roman alphabet.  The problem is that I have trouble seeing whether it's a start quote or an end quote.

So when I read Greek writing I write it down in Roman transliteration.  That isn't so hard, except that there are two "E" vowels and two "O" vowels, so with the hard E and O (eta and omega) I add a carat accent (E^ and O^) while the soft E and O (epsilon and omicron) are unaccented.  And the vowel upsilon had a "U" sound so I write it as U except when it comes between two consonants, then it write it as "Y" because that's the general practice (hence words like "hyperbole").

And with the dative case there's this little mark under the last letter, pronounced a bit like "I" but slighter, so for that I add a tilde (~).  And sometimes I'll add an "H" between vowels, like with Lahis. (The Greek writing sometimes puts an umlaut over the second vowel to make clear that they aren't a diphthong.)