Archiv für März 2007
The root of the word “trivial”
11. Mrz
Today, I came across the seven liberal arts (artes liberales in Latin) which were the basis for the education of students in the middle ages. They are:
- grammar
- rhetoric
- dialectic
and
- arithmetic
- astronomy
- geometry
- music
The seven disciplines were divided into the three verbal arts known as the trivium (means: “the threefold way”), and the four other subjects that were known collectively as the quadrivium.
I can now understand easily why something is called trivial.


