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

BTW, how is one supposed to pronounce 'Deus' (notice I didn;t ask how *you* pronounce it )

Is it day-us, ders, duece, or what?

Day-us...

I loathed and hated latin at school, mainly because I was taught by a smug little air-head for whom I had a deep and abiding contempt. I failed the O Level at the first atempt by the simple expedient of not doing any homework for two years. I passed it the second time around, because by then I had made my point. You can take a whore to culture, but you cannot make her decline latin nouns if she is not so inclined.

However...

I am very glad I did my five years of Latin; I can work out what a lot of English words mean simply by disentangling the building-blocks they are made up of, and likewise I can make some educated guesses about words in the Romance languages too. I have a good working knowledge of grammar. The other thing which contributes to my use of the language was ten years or so listening to the 1662 Prayer Book and the King James Version of the bible on Sundays.

I remain very grateful that I did do Latin at school, though I hated my parents for forcing me to do it, and I wish I had more of that 17th Century poetry in my mind's ear now.

Ben

I know what you mean about being able to translate unknown languages...after spending 3 yrs studying german (under 4 teachers) and one yr of latin - 4 years after dropping both I chose to answer the questions about french in my general studies exam. Because it was a multiple choice exam and the questions where in english about a french piece of text I found it really easy to make a good guess at the right answer - much more so than if I'd answered the questions on a german or latin text because I ended up second guessing myself based on half remembered bits of information

Am I the only person in the world who, disgusted at the complete lack of Latin lessons made available in Australian schools, purchased her own set of Latin primers and textbooks and set out to teach herself?


No. I'm not. My best friend did it as well.

Nutter!

To answer the original question:

Di Ex Machina (pronounced dee)

Wrong! Big red cross, go to the bottom of the class.

The stem of 'Deus' is 'De-', not 'D-'. So the endings are tacked on to the end of 'De-', which makes the plural 'Dei', like I said in the first place.

who got B in her Latin 'O'-level, and which she'd taken Latin for 'A'-level

Wrong! Well, partially wrong.

At least you saying I was wrong was wrong..

Yes, the full form would be Dei. But in 98.5% of all occurences, this is actually contracted to Di.

As far as I know, deus is the only word with this funny contraction of e before i. It's definitely the case though - Horace and Cicero use it.

I suppose latin comes in handy for phrases like "persona non grata".
Is there an Engish equivalent for that? Maybe "bad smell". OH bugger it. Now I need to know the plural of PNG.

Personae non gratae.