Re: Ada Job Opportunity - Repost

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

dweller@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (David Weller) wrote in response to
Robert Eachus's summary of the trivium/quadrivium question:

>Actually, in a brazen demonstration of honesty, I might suggest that
>all your respondents had a _dictionary_ of some sort :-)

That is not a brazen demonstration of honesty, but a brazen attack on
the integrity of Eachus's (other) correspondents.  As it happens, I
_do_ have a dictionary.  Several dictionaries.  Two English, one Latin,
one Esperanto, one Maaori, one Hawaiian.  My Greek, Hebrew, French, and
Klingon dictionaries are at home, with another English one.  Of these,
the only one to define either of the terms is Cassell's Latin dictionary,
which defines "quadrivium" as "a place where four roads meet; a cross-roads",
which is not the relevant sense.

The answer _I_ mailed to Eachus was based on what I've read in Adler,
Alasdair Macintyre, Dorothy L. Sayers, and a book on Thomism.

[Lest I seem to boast, just because I possess a dictionary for a language
does not mean I _speak_ that language at all.  It just means I'd _like_ to.]

I for one have no reason whatsoever to suspect Eachus's correspondents of
having looked up the answer in a dictionary instead of recalling it, and
consider the insinuation that they did unwarranted.

-- 
"The complex-type shall be a simple-type."  ISO 10206:1991 (Extended Pascal)
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.