Ya'll Want a Dwarf?

The boys, my sister and I are all attending Greek school twice a week. Not surprisingly, the classes are rather laid-back and lack the degree of organization one would expect in, say, a German class.

An adult beginning class probably isn't appropriate for me, but my goal is to increase my vocabulary, improve my grammar, and learn past tense, all of which can be accomplished while helping Sandra.

During our second class, we received a book (The Greek Language), which is clearly used by 6 or 7-year olds in Greece to learn to read and write. Our class is using it for the same purpose. 

Along with words like "ball," "tiger," "sun," and "telephone" was the word "nanos." From the picture, it appeared that the word  meant "elf."  Since I can already read Greek, our teacher often has me read and translate accompanying instructions. As one of my classmates sounded out nanos I looked at the instructions for the fun activity below the exercise.

 Color these seven nanos. Hmmm.

That's when someone said, "So nanos means elf?" And we were horrified to hear, "No. Dwarf. Or Midget. Same word in Greek."  So, yeah, there among "ball," "tiger" and "sun" is "dwarf." Our class erupted in laughter - a mixture of amusement and horror.

Well, the other night, Sandra came over to do our homework. It was to write sentences conjugating the verbs "to have" and "to want."  Thumbing through the book and her notes looking for vocabulary words to use for her sentence showing the "plural you" form for "to want," Sandra giggled and wrote her sentence. She passed her paper to me, and asked if it was correct.

Thelete ena nano? Grammatically, it was correct as far as I could tell. But did she really want to write, "Ya'll want a dwarf?"  She did.

Seriously, what would you think o nanos meant?