Latin Language and Engineering ?

Question

I am writting an essay, and i need some idea on how latin and the dicipline engineering are similar.

Thank you

Answer 1

Wow, I was blown away when I read this question.  When I went to school, I got a double degree, studying concurrently Classical Studies (including Latin and Greek) and Mechanical Engineering.  When I graduated, I received a BA Classics and BS MechE on the same day.  I thought I was the only person who thought of these two things in the same sentence.. can you please tell me what your essay is about, or why you chose to compare these two subjects?

In return, here is what is similar (from probably one of the few people who has a good inside understanding of both!)- they both deal with problem solving and outside the box thinking.  An engineer is a problem-solver, so what you do is you give him a background with all these different classes (physics, math, statics [forces on stationary things], dynamics [forces on moving things], fluids, materials, thermodynamics, heat transfer, and electronics just to name a few things... and then you give him a problem to solve.  This armor is too weak- how can we fix it?  Well I rely on my knowledge of materials, how things break, how loads are introduced, etc. to figure that out.  This building doesn't get cold enough- how can we fix it?  Then I rely on my knowledge, of air flow, heat transfer, and thermodynamics to figure that out.  You need the outside of the box thinking like I mentioned before, because in a lot of cases you have literally an endless amount of ways to solve the problem, and an endless number of solutions.  Which will you pick, and why?  You need to be able to think of problems from many different angles.

Latin, funny enough, is similar.  More than many modern day languages, you need to decode the message.  You can't just go word by word and translate- no, each word has many different endings, and you have to know what the ending is, what the ending means, why that ending is used in that situation, why the word placement is as it is, why the word is used as opposed to other word, etc.  In grammar school Latin, they tell you that word order doesn't matter at all- a rather foreign concept to most.  In reality, it does matter somewhat (depending on what kind of work you're reading- in poetry though, all bets on word order are certainly off for the most part, a lot worse than in English), but you learn that a lot later.  The problem also is not just that the sentence and grammatical structure is unusual to most (Westerners, at least), but the time frame was different, so you have to keep that in mind as well.  Not only was the language different, but the way of thinking was different, so you have to not only decode what each word means, but what the h**l they all mean together, and what they could mean at that point in history.  To complicate matters, many words also have several different meanings, some of them wildly different because we don't quite understand the root meaning of the word, so it's used in many situations that seem to be unrelated to us, but if you knew the language originally, it would make sense.  Other times, when you add certain endings on to one word, it looks exactly like a completely different word.  I hope I'm being understandable.  Anyway, the point is, it's a lot like the situation I described earlier with the engineer, where you have many different ways to do something or to interpret something, but you need to find the best way given the circumstances.

Memorization is also important in both, because in the one case you must memorize formulas and constants, in the other case you must memorize vocabulary and grammatical rules.  In the end though, languages and science, although they seem to be diametrically opposed (even in our brains, as one half controls artistic thought and speech and the other half controls rational logic and memorization) have much more in common than most would think.

Hope this helps, and thanks for asking this question!

Answer 2

The strict rules (grammar - mathematics, testing)? Latin squares?