Adventures from Latin today:
-So, today's assignment was Pliny's letter 25, which is to Tacitus about his uncle, Pliny the Elder's, death during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. For some reason, even though Pliny as a whole is pretty easy Latin, my mind totally died while trying to prepare this letter. It took me about two hours to figure out that in the line "Quamvis enim pulcherrimarum clade terrarum", the pulcherrimarum terrarum was a partative genitive with quamvis. Said realization came during lunch as I was sitting with two other people at the table who were having a conversation quite unrelated to Pliny, and of course, as I am wont to do while translating Latin, I exclaimed this in a rather loud voice, which confused one of the people at the table who thought that I was talking to him and couldn't understand what I was saying. Also, the edition that I'm working from hypenates "eruditissimo" in "eruditissimo viro" after the first s, which I missed, and I spent about twenty minutes trying to work out how a snub-nosed man fit into the sentence before I gave up. Sorry for the Latin geeking, I just had to get it out of my system.
-As I have already said, the entire school leaves for Crete tomorrow, and so our professor was talking about various people from Crete that either he or someone he knows know. He says that his grandfather is friends with this Cretan who is somewhat of a terrorist (puts bombs into buildings and cars, beats people up, available for assassinations, that kind of thing), but is otherwise "a very nice man." Class is laughing in disbelief at this statement. The professor also gave us advice on the best places to get souvlaki in Crete and told us that we ought to try the raki while we're there.
Other adventures:
-We covered the theogeny today in Myth and Religion, so we managed to make it from the mist that preceeded Khaos to the Great Deluge in an hour and a half. It was amazing. There was just so much information and so many stories, and we were going so fast, that my head was spinning a bit. It was so much fun.
-I'm going to Santorini with my roommates the weekend after we get back from Crete, so next weekend. I'm excited...
-I have had two other girls from the program ask me for directions to the local yarn shop after they saw me knitting. It's nice to know I'm not the only one with this vice. Also, I think that I'm going to have to knit something more complicated so it takes longer, because otherwise I'm going to end up spending way too much money on yarn, especially as the yarn stores sell nicer yarn than the cheap acrylic that I'm used to, and I'm not sure I'll be able to resist that...
Also, does anyone have any ideas of how learning Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, or Urdu (especially Arabic or Turkish) would benefit me in my later studies/career/life? If you do, please let me know. I want to apply for a Critical Language Scholarship for this summer, where the State Department would pay for me to live abroad for seven to ten weeks to intensively study one of the languages listed above, which the United States Government has designated as ones that more Americans desperately need to know, and that's one of the questions that they ask on the application.
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2 comments:
Um... do you really need a reason to learn another language? You could always use it for expanding a library into that language, or something.
I don't need a reason for learning another language (I think that learning new languages for the sake of learning languages is reason enough), but this is a really competitive grant from the State Department, and if I can't give them a really good reason why they ought to pay for me to do this... then I won't get the grant.
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