Today we looked at numbers in Latin and in Ancient Greek, and discovered that they're still all around us in the modern world. Firstly, Latin, where we played a game of Word Roots Challenge, trying to find as many English words that come from...
This then led to several of the students asking, puzzedly, "If 'octo' means eight, then why isn't October the eighth month?" Two reasons for the confusion: (1) Romans started their year in March, and (2) these guys inserted their not-immodest egos into our calendars and got rid of the names for months 5 (Quintilis) and 6 (Sextilis).
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| Julius Caesar (July) |
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| Augustus aka Octavian (August) |
For more details behind the months' names, click here. We then turned our attention to Ancient Greek numbers. This time, working in reverse, we used English words as clues to help us work out Greek numerals:
This then led to another discussion about words ending '-athlon' (e.g. triathlon, pentathlon, decathlon): 'athlon' means 'competition' or 'contest' in Ancient Greek, so the number before it denotes how many competitions, or events, there are.
