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Translate that, smarty pants.

Pfft.

That was all we ever used it for - Cicero, The Odyssey, The Twelve Labors - it was highschool though, so we never really got into primary documents and all the cool stuff that colleges can get their hands on. .

Cicero was interesting though.

Everyone feel better?

No. My tummy hurts.

I'd like to study old and middle English writing.

Have you ever seen that stuff? It's almost impossible to decifer, between the handwriting and the language itself, which seemed to have a decent helping of German incorporated.

My paleography skills end about 1650 in Italian and French, though I have successfully translated original documents from microfilm going back to 1621 with a great deal of difficulty.

My paleography extends as far back as mid 19th century American english.

And it really helps if it's on microfiche. Oh, and if the person at the Reference Desk could show me how to find the roll I'm looking for, I'd really appreciate that too.

I guess it's a real shame that I'm so damn lost inside a library, but I never paid attention to library tours as a student. There was too much other cool stuff in a library to distract me than some boring guy telling me "And this is where we keep the WSJ archives, here's the full text database...blah."

You know, the coolest thing I ever saw was the records room at the courthouse. We went there to get our marriage license, and they had the actual records of marriages/deaths/births in our county going back hundreds of years. It was pretty sweet

My paleography extends as far back as mid 19th century American english.

And it really helps if it's on microfiche. Oh, and if the person at the Reference Desk could show me how to find the roll I'm looking for, I'd really appreciate that too.

I guess it's a real shame that I'm so damn lost inside a library, but I never paid attention to library tours as a student. There was too much other cool stuff in a library to distract me than some boring guy telling me "And this is where we keep the WSJ archives, here's the full text database...blah."

You know, the coolest thing I ever saw was the records room at the courthouse. We went there to get our marriage license, and they had the actual records of marriages/deaths/births in our county going back hundreds of years. It was pretty sweet.

If you don't study spoken Latin, how do you know how to pronounce the words you're reading?

That's the best part - I'd imagine that there were actually a whole host of Latin pronounciations, but these days we've only got two main ones: Classical and Ecclesiatical. Classical is supposed to be the most historically accurate - as you would hear the language spoke in maybe 60 B.C. or so. Ecclesiatical is the pronunciation used in Roman Catholic Masses and all that jazz.

Most people actually spoke "vulgar" Latin (an actual term), whith varied dialects and accents, which is why the romance languages sound so different from each other but are so closely related.

Harvey, I can't pronounce sign language, either, but people manage to translate it.