Researchable PM-based history quiz

[Aion]

Hey sydhe, it's a pity your quiz doesn't attract more participation, because it's a really decent one . I'd love to submit too, but I have my abitur (university entrance diploma) exams starting on friday, and yeah, that means I really don't have time for history quizzes and stuff. I'm sure you understand.

 

[sydhe]

I can give people a few more days. Sometime I should try to come up with a completely non-European quiz that people actually have a chance of answering (although Taliesen got several of the non-European questions too.

 

[slip79]

Few more hours please....??

 

[sydhe]

Certainly. I don't have all the answers prepared yet. Probably this weekend sometime.

 

[Taliesin]

Sydhe, did you get my last PM?

 

[sydhe]

Sorry, I thought I'd replied to it. I'll do that now.

 

[sydhe]

Taliesen's up to an intimidating 43 points, partially solving #3 and completely solving #9.

Nobody's attempted #4 or #5.

 

[sydhe]

Slip79 steps in with 28 points, so we now have:

Taliesen 44 Points
Slip 28 Points
Till 14 Points

 

[sydhe]

1) On December 29, 1675, King Charles II of England signed a proclamation banning something, a proclamation which within a year had virtually no effect. What did he ban, and why?

The proclamation banned coffeehouses. The Restoration was partially attributed to political discussions in public coffeehouses, and Charles’s government reasoned that the institutions could easily work against him as for him.
2) Who is the person associated with the following:

Let X be any set of disjoint non-empty sets. Then we can choose a member from each set in X.
G provable ->~G, therefore G is not provable.
Sorry,

Kurt Gödel
The first picture is Georg Cantor, who, among other things proposed the continuum hypothesis. Gödel showed the hypothesis was consistent with the Peano axioms of set theory. (The negation is also consistent; that is, the continuum hypothesis is independent of the Peano Axioms. The proof of this was completed by Paul Cohen)
The first mathematical statement is the axiom of choice, which Gödel also proved consistent with the Peano axioms. (The negation--there is some collection X of sets where we can’t choose a member from each set--is also consistent; that is, the axiom of choice is independent of the Peano Axioms. The proof of this was also completed by Paul Cohen)
The second mathematical statement is the crux of Gödel’s first theorem.
The second picture is David Hilbert. Gödel’s theorem disposed of one of Hilbert’s famous problems, in the negative.
3) Where was the first place the 7th century Arabic expansion was definitively stopped? What is the name of the agreement that resulted?

They were stopped going up the Nile into Nubia, specifically at the battle of Dongola in 651, which is why the southern Sudan and Ethiopia are not Muslim. The treaty between the Arabs and the Nubians was called the Bakt, which either comes from the Latin word for treaty, or the Egyptian word for barter. The Bakt lasted for well over five hundred years, and still affects the religious makeup of the region today.
4) Who is the person associated with the following:

Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, aka Carlos I of Spain and ruler of many other countries. First picture is Ghent, where he was born. Second is his mother, Juana the Mad. The third is the palace of Charles V that is part of the Alhambra. Fourth is the flag of the Seventeen Provinces, which were fully united under Charles. The European Eel is because Charles died from the effects of eating an eel pie. The additional hints are pictures of Ferdinand and Isabella, his maternal grandparents, and Philip the Handsome and Juana the Mad, his parents.

5) This time I’m after a place:

The country of Bhutan. The dragons are because Bhutan is the Land of the Thunder Dragon. The first photograph is the Takstang Monastery. The last is the Punakha Dzong, originally the palace of Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the founder of Bhutan.

 

[sydhe]

6) What is the name of the document containing the following? What is remarkable about the document?

These are excerpts from the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious document from the 16th or 17th centuries that has never been deciphered; it is not known what language it is in, or whether it’s in a language at all. Some of the plants seem to belong to no known species, and it’s suspected the document may be a hoax.

7) What is the name of this sculpture, and where is it located?

The sculpture is “Kryptos” and is located in front of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

8) These pictures are associated with a place. What is the place? (Two should be easy)

Tierra del Fuego.
The first picture is Ushuaia, the capital of Argentine Tierra del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world. Second is Cape Horn. The two portraits are Charles Darwin, who visited there on the voyage of the Beagle and Ferdinand Magellan, whose voyage made the European discovery of the island. The Straits of Magellan lie north of the archipelago.

9) Who are these people and what do they have in common? Two points per person; two points for what they have in common

The person thrusting with the sword:

The person on the left:

They are Anne Bonny, Mary Read and Grace O’Malley, and they were all famous female pirates. (They also all apparently died of natural causes, which is more than you can say for many male pirates.)

10) Five letters of the Latin alphabet are descended from the same letter of the Phoenician alphabet.
a) What Phoenician letter
b) What are the Greek letters which descended from it?
c) Which letters in the Latin Alphabet descended from it?
a. The Phoenician letter waw, which looked something like our Y and was pronounced like W. Wau is still a letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
b. Waw was brought twice into the Greek alphabet, by turning the prongs sideways to make the archaic Greek digamma, which looks like our letter F but was pronounced like W, and a second time as upsilon, the capital of which looks like a Y and the small letter like a u.
c. F, U, V, W and Y. The Romans changed the sound of digamma to F, letting U double for the W sound. (Latin didn’t have the V sound; Venus would have been pronounced Wee-nus.) They adopted upsilon twice, the first time creating U for their U and W sounds, the second Y to transliterate Greek upsilon. W separated in the middle ages, and U and V, originally one letter, were finally distinguished as vowel and consonant in the modern era.

 

[sydhe]

Taliesen's up.

 

[Taliesin]

I'll see if I can get a quiz up today.

 

[Taliesin]

I spent the longest time trying to see if I could make Henry I of England fit number 4, because he also died after eating too many eels. Charles V was one of my first offhand guesses, because of the flag, but unfortunately for me I dismissed him without researching him. It was really a great quiz, sydhe, so it's a shame there were so few who attempted it.

 

[Taliesin]

1. What do a foil, a bow, an east Caribbean archipelago, and an Austrian chocolate liqueur have in common? 3 points.
2. Who is suggested here? 3 points.

3. Who or what was a souper? 2 points.
4. Name the implied person, place, or thing. This is not a question of simple association, because the clues are mostly two or 3 degrees removed from the answer. You have to look a little deeper for the answer, so I've given a good number of clues. 4 points for the answer, 1 for each picture and its relevance.

 

[Taliesin]

5. It's probably not best remembered for this feature, but what construction gave England its first public toilets? 2 points.
6. What modern sporting event was bedeviled by complaints and arguments about such things as sunglasses, swivelling chairs, yogurt, mirrors, and hypnosis, culminating in one side employing Indian priests to block psychic attacks allegedly mounted by the other side's parapsychologist? 3 points.
7. "Tot semblava un món en flor, i l'ànima n'era jo." Give the language, the poet, and a translation, for one point each.
8. What people produced the following artefacts? 4 points.

9. Name two myths in which a male divinity looks back and loses his beloved. 1 point for one, 3 for two.
10. In what building did I take this photograph? 3 points.

11. Who is this fellow, and where should I seek his monument? 2 points each, and 2 bonus points for saying-- precisely-- how I should seek his monument.

That makes a nice round total of 42 points with bonus. Good luck! For now I'll set next Monday, the 30th, as the deadline, but I'm completely flexible on that one. If you want more time, or less, let me know.

 

[Israelite9191]

I am a lurker in this part of the forum, so do not expect more of an input from me, mainly because I do not have the time to research. However, the statement made that "wau" is a letter of the modern Hebrew alphabet is incorrect. For one thing, there is no "w" sound in Hebrew at all, and all letters of the Hebrew alphabet (unless silent) begin with the sound that they make. Furthermore, the only silent letters of the Hebrew alphabet are Aleph and Ayin. The closest letters to the Phoenician "waw" and your supposed "wau" are Shin/Sin (&#1513 and Vav (&#1493. While either of the two, particularly Vav, may be related to "waw" the letter most certainly is not "wau". Also, the direction of descent (Phoenician to Hebrew or Hebrew to Phoenician) is also a matter of dispute. Most importantly of all of this, however, is that there is no letter "wau" in the Hebrew language.

 

[Israelite9191]

After more research I found that the "wau" that you refer to is a ancient letter that is the ancestor of the modern Vav. However, the statement that "waw" still exists is inacurate.

 

[sydhe]

You're correct. Apparently what was once a w sound became a v, which sounds strange but happened in Romance languages too. The letter gets transliterated both ways, but vav is better (YHWH becooming YHVH.)

 

[Israelite9191]

After more extensive research (got time on my hands today) I found that the statement is not completely false since the letter is still pronounced 'w' and 'waw' in the Judaic-Arabic language. This, however, more likely came into being because of combination with Arabic rather than a persistance of the 'w' sound. However, the Judaic-Arabic language is not Hebrew and is actually quite different.

 

[Taliesin]

The first foray into my quiz, a decent effort from sydhe, puts him on the board with 10 points.