# The "Greek to me" Graph


In English, when people don't understand what you are saying, they might say "it's Greek to me". We can represent this relationship with a direct edge from an _English_ node to a _Greek_ node. [This Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me) collects similar idioms in various languages. We can construct a graph from this!

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## Notable Previous Works

I was excited about this brilliant idea until I googled 'greek to me graph'. Of course, people have already done it. [This post (2015)](https://blog.jverkamp.com/2015/04/17/its-all-greek-to-me/) shows how to use python to parse the Wikipedia page and generate the graph, highly recommended.

Mark Liberman (he has his own [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Liberman)), a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, [posted on this topic in 2009](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024) (funny side note: the id of this post is 1024). His graph is shown below.

{{<figure src="./greek-mark.png">}}

In 2017, [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6x7c8k/various_languages_equivalent_of_its_all_greek_to/) was submitted to Reddit but only received 63 upvotes.

{{<figure src="./greek-2017-reddit.png">}}

In 2021, [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/o6cauu/directed_graph_of_stereotypical/) was submitted to Reddit and received 17.9k upvotes. I guess the national flags and choosing the right subreddit helped.

{{<figure src="./greek-2021-reddit.png">}}

## Conclusion

In the end, I didn't make my graph - no need to reinvent the wheel. But it's interesting to see that my mother tongue - Chinese - is perceived as a very difficult language by a lot of people, which I totally agree with! It is not easy, but at the same time, it's so beautiful.