This
is not about Trivial Pursuit, “the
original trivia game that started it all.
… Players roll a die and move
along the track in any direction they like. When a player stops on a color[,] they
get a question …” (boardgamegeek.com)
Our family used to play it as one of many board games
we’ve owned.
By the way, here’s a
current version I was not aware of:
“Star
Trek 50th Anniversary Trivial Pursuit board game. This collector's edition game features 1200
questions about all 5 Star Trek television series and the first 10 Star Trek
movies spanning over 50 years with a collectible Galileo 01 Enterprise
Shuttlecraft to store the cards, plus custom die.” (30 bucks at shop.startrek.com)
Reminds me of my first year at the University of Utah, where I observed students watching "Star Trek" on TVs in the "study" hall. I sometimes wondered how they could do that while focusing on their books.
Of
course it’s about language, so I searched “language trivia” and instantly found
this:
http://edl.ecml.at/LanguageFun/LanguageQuiz
["European
Day of Languages" is 26 September; (sorry I missed it.)]
"To
celebrate the European Day of Languages, we suggest a quiz to give you the
chance to test your knowledge about the languages of our continent.
...
Miscellaneous - Question #1
Question:
Who was the founder of Esperanto?
Ferdinand
de Saussure
J.
R. R. Tolkien
Naom
Chomsky
Ludwig
Lazarus Zamenhof
[Clicked:]
Language Trivia
[For
years, my younger sister taught Russian in high school, so I clicked Russian.]
Did you know this about Russian?
01
Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is the
native language of 142 million citizens of the Russian Federation, the world's
largest country. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia
and the most widely spoken Slavic language.
02
Besides Russian, there are 160 ethnic groups speaking about 100 different
languages in Russia.
03
The Russian alphabet, known as Cyrillic, goes back to the ninth century. Its
most ancient version was devised by two Greek missionaries – brothers Cyril and
Methodius, both outstanding scholars and linguists. The alphabet assumed its
modern shape in the 17th century under Peter the Great, while the written
Russian of today was introduced by the Soviet government in 1918. The reform
didn’t just simplify the writing but symbolised a break with the Tsarist past. [In USA we spell it symbolized.]
04
Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet contains 33 letters, 2 of which have no sound on
their own, but they carry grammatical meaning and are still considered
letters. ...
05
Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.
Russian is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal
knowledge—60–70% of all world information is published in the English and
Russian languages.
06
Unearthed in 2000, the Novgorod Codex is considered to be the most ancient
Russian book which dates back to the beginning of the 11th century. The wooden
book with four wax pages was used for a few decades to record psalms and other
religious texts.
...
08
"Bistro" a small restaurant or café could have originated from the
Russian "bystro", meaning "quick" or "rapidly".
The word may have been loaned when the Russian Cossacks occupied Paris in 1814,
at the end of the Napoleon war. Russian Cossacks, who wanted to be served
quickly, would shout "bystro". The French, supposedly, picked it up
and adopted it as a name for their small restaurants with robust earthy dishes
that later on conquered the world. ...
09
Russian names generally consist of three parts: the first or given name, the
patronymic, and the last or family name.
...
10
The Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1944)
was established as a research center for Russian language and Russian
literature ..."
(edl.ecml.at/LanguageFun/LanguageQuiz)
As
many of us know, it’s easy to play and engage in an endless pursuit of trivia, but we don’t do that. Too much work to do … amid so many fascinating facts to
learn.
