Cat. & Reference: All in a Day's Work
Things I cataloged today:
A textbook for English speakers learning to read and write classical Chinese prose.
A two volume set of books on the history of roads in Spain.
A book about an Ancient Roman silver drinking vessel with homoerotic bas-relief decorations and the scandal that ensued when it was acquired for the British Museum. (I'm pretty much scandalized.)
A book on the Ethiopic book of Enoch (which I had never heard of because I'm apparently not up on the pseudoepigrapha).
A book about an later iron age cemetary and a post-Roman cemetary located near what is now Bristol, England.
A book on reindeer herders in the Kola Peninsula of northern Russia. (Reindeer! Sweden!)
7 Comments:
"Read and write classical Chinese prose." Read, I can understand. But write?
There are signficant grammatical differences between modern and classical Chinese, apparently. (It's not designed to turn you into a fabulous writer, if that's what you're thinking.)
Pirates!
Petra - (Or maybe you just don't see the point of speaking / writing dead languages.)
I'd be interested in the Ethopian book of Enoch...
Please. I love dead languages. I just don't see the value of writing them.
(I figured that was the case about grammatical differences, but shouldn't recognition and comprehension of said differences be enough? Do they have to focus on production as well?)
Petra - Out of curiousity, are you someone who doesn't care about language production, generally? Would you rather just be able to understand and read even living languages, and not have to bother with speaking and writing?
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