h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting about the mathematician and the Latin Class - reminds me of when I was at school aged 16-18 I studied Maths and Classical Civilisation.

(That was considered an odd combination of subjects, but strangely not as odd as Maths with German, which was an impossible combination for the timetable, so I had to wait a couple of years to study German. The only disadvantage of it being an odd combination was that, because all the other students in the class had mostly coursework for their other subjects, our Classical Civilisation course was selected to be the end-of-year exam version, so I had 100% exams and no coursework. I liked maths because I learned tools rather than memorising answers, and did more thinking than writing in the exam, whereas I had to memorise chunks of books for Classical Civilisation exams and write 4,000 words in 3 hours non-stop, which was not my idea of fun, but at least I enjoyed the classes...)

The Aeneid was one of our set texts, but the teacher did give us a hand with it - we focused mainly on the odd-numbered books, because 'nothing much happens in the even-numbered ones', and we also read in English translation rather than having to tackle dactylic hexameter.

"So here's to making the world a better-informed place, one respectful, entertaining conversation at a time." - yes indeed That, for me, is what h2g2 is all about For example, I can say thank you to you for explaining the origin of some of the memes I saw recently

'Nothing much happens in the even-numbered ones' - I love it!

Thanks, Sasha - for the reminiscence and for the feedback! I'm always having to research these memes, so I figure other people might be trying to look them up, too.

That's interesting about the way your courses worked. It sounds like your brain got a workout! The US system is so different that high schoolers never run into things like that.

But I studied in Germany, so well do I know the standard German university dead-language test. I didn't do any classical languages - they expect you to know them already, so I crammed Latin and Greek in the US. But Old English, Middle High German, Old Norse, Gothic, etc? You get one page of 'apply Grimm's Law here, what class is that verb?' and one page of a text in a dead, dead language. Almost always poetry.

Which you have to translate without a dictionary.

The WORST one turned out to be Middle English. 'Aha,' you say, 'that's ridiculous. An English speaker can read Chaucer without a dictionary.'

This is true. But it was the Miller's tale. It had an embarrassing word in it. And I had to translate it into German and they don't teach you that kind of vocabulary, you know...

I put in an explanatory footnote. The professor got a good laugh.