[deanmen]

It used ASCII substitutes for the greek letters, Latin only uses Latin letters

    $luw$:{I} [loose|destroy]
    $eluon$:{I} [loosed|destroyed|was loosing|was destroying]
    $elusa$:{I} [loosed|destroyed]
    $leluka$:{I} have [loosed|destroyed]
    $lusw$:{I} will [loose|destroy]
    $luswn$:[loosing|destroying]
    $lusas$:{having} [loosed|destroyed]

[schoen]

I tried the quiz after reading the mailing list message and got three of them right. (I didn't study Greek long enough to get all the way through the verb paradigm and I haven't used it very regularly since then.) So yeah, I don't get the claim that nobody could play this quiz. I think I have friends who would get all of them right offhand. It's no more complicated than knowing the difference between "hablo", "hablaré", "hablé", "hablaba", "hablado", and "hablando" in Spanish, except that fewer people study ancient Greek than modern Spanish (and the older Indo-European languages do more stem-mutation between tenses, so it can be a bit more effort to memorize).

The worst part of this format is probably that if you did "quiz english greek" it wouldn't accept any form of accent or breathing marks, even though these are also standardized in beta code and some people would probably try to type them, like "e)luon" to show that there's no /h/ sound at the beginning of that word. And I don't think typing beta code in between dollar signs is a very common convention today, but the quiz would require it; you can't just type "luw", you have to type "$luw$".

[anthk]

Spanish has rules for verbs ending with -ar,-er- and -ir save for few exceptions. Still, RAE should have accepted "conducí" as "conduje" long ago (and the rest of declinations/verbs such as traducir, reducir...) IDK about Greek.

If we are using two valid ending forms of Subjunctive (-era/-ese) since forever, IDK why couldn't we set these irregular verbs back to regularity.

[schoen]

Greek has verbs with different "thematic vowels", which are sort of like the Spanish conjugations, but not exactly the same thing (although I think both varieties of verb groupings probably have a distantly shared origin in Indo-European).

The Spanish conjugations -ar, -er, and -ir derive from Latin conjugations, which are usually analyzed as having four different regular conjugation patterns (there are long and short e, giving -ēre and -ere, in addition to -āre and -īre), although one can choose to make additional distinctions.

Generally older Indo-European languages have more complex morphology than newer ones, including more paradigms and more irregular forms. Ancient Greek verbs are definitely morphologically more complex than modern Spanish verbs.

[nescioquid]

I would guess most people interested in the quiz would be familiar with betacode (which this looks like, sans diacritics).

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Code

[buescher]

"Beta Code was developed by David W. Packard" (not that David Packard, but his son). Neat.