# Do other countries/languages teach literature analysis? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 19, 2011, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798 "2011-09-19T07:16:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/61 "2011-09-20T04:25:07Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > It’s not about “truth values.” it’s about teaching students to look at a dork with an eye fir details … . Hmmm … pants too short, taped up glasses, pocket protector … fascinating. ---
**Author:** ![Aqua\_regis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d78d45/32.png) [@Aqua\_regis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aqua_regis)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/62 "2011-09-20T07:19:21Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#): > > You misunderstand my point. Hamlet is like a ball in that you can play a variety of different games with it by applying a variety of different “rules”. A Marxist reading will not be the same as a queer reading or a structuralist reading. Each may illuminate interesting truths, some of which may have been entirely unintended by Shakespeare. But there’s no way to say which set of “rules” is more true or reasonable. Some ways of reading might be more common or comfortable, but that’s a function of the reader’s circumstance, not a property of the text itself. And I happen to have a book around, _Is there a single right interpretation?_, some of whose contributors (it’s a collection of essays) would disagree with the lack of a preferred rule set, Even if I myself would agree. And you misunderstood my point, though I wasn’t very clear about it, namely that given that interpretation adheres to some rules, Jragon’s demand for true or reasonable interpretations is not quite so unreasonable as has at times been made in out in the thread. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/63 "2011-09-20T07:34:48Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Nope, I just asked a professor and she said this is correct, and this isn’t a professor at Podunk U, I’m at the University of Arizona, which is fairly high on the charts in linguistics. She says that most (naturally occurring human) languages have absolutely no orthography. To perhaps get past definition differences, here’s the definition of language they use: > > “A systematic, rule governed form of human communication that uses arbitrary signs (spoken, signed, or written) in a creative way.” > > Note that this is a “politics free” definition of language, and doesn’t attempt to delineate languages based on common political or social boundaries, or on mutual intelligibility. Ah. So she means languages and dialects spoken by as little as a single person (as in the article you linked to on the next page). It also sounds as if she’s including body language and sign languages. That may well be politics-free, but it’s also rather misleading; it sounds as if most people in the world don’t have a written form for their language, when in fact the number is probably in the thousands. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/64 "2011-09-20T07:37:49Z")
Are you guys really that floored by the concept of BSing a paper? ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/65 "2011-09-20T07:48:01Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Ah. So she means languages and dialects spoken by as little as a single person (as in the article you linked to on the next page). It also sounds as if she’s including body language and sign languages. That may well be politics-free, but it’s also rather misleading; it sounds as if most people in the world don’t have a written form for their language, when in fact the number is probably in the thousands. Not body language, in this case, since body language is usually ancillary to other language (signed, etc). Sign language is a language, smiling and nodding is a component of a bigger language. I know there aren’t _many_ cases per capita, I know usually they use the dominant language of the area. My question was more of the sense of “just in case there exists a small tribe somewhere, that has a school system in their language, but it hasn’t been written down yet, I’d be very interested if they had something similar to literary analysis with oral tradition.” ---
**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/66 "2011-09-20T08:42:09Z")
Haven’t read the thread, just posting a Dutch data point: Yes, at least up untill the early nineties literary analysis was taught in highschool and college. In 1978 a famous Dutch writer, Karel van het Reve delivered a near-fatal blow to Dutch literary studies with his the Huizinga Lecture, under the title: Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid (Literary studies. The enigma of unreadability). That essay alone has convinced thousands of students to go study something useful instead. I don’t know what the current state of affairs is. I hope literary analysis has been abandoned in favour of artisan writing classes. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 8:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/67 "2011-09-20T08:46:50Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Not body language, in this case, since body language is usually ancillary to other language (signed, etc). Sign language is a language, smiling and nodding is a component of a bigger language. I know there aren’t _many_ cases per capita, I know usually they use the dominant language of the area. My question was more of the sense of “just in case there exists a small tribe somewhere, that has a school system in their language, but it hasn’t been written down yet, I’d be very interested if they had something similar to literary analysis with oral tradition.” I see. I don’t think it would be possible to have a school system without a written language. It would still be possible to analyse stories known only orally - Socrates and Plato do that with the Greek myths, after all. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/68 "2011-09-20T11:52:14Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Are you guys really that floored by the concept of BSing a paper? No, but \*\*Jragon \*\*is saying he’s a bad writer who BSed his thesis and made an A, while good writers with strong, well-supported arguments made worse grades. That doesn’t seem very likely to me, unless the professor is a nut (always possible). ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/69 "2011-09-20T13:18:26Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Sorry, I didn’t look through the article as much as I should have, was in a hurry. I can say that all of the linguistics professors and grad students I’ve taked to have lamented this fact, so while I can’t offer a hard cite, I can say that at least a few people with some ethos have told me this. Your “first language” works differently in different parts of the world. In Francophone Africa, the term they use translates to “maternal language.” This is likely an extremely local language that may well be incomprehensible outside of your specific village. It is the language your family uses with you. At this point, it may just be the language that your old grandmother speaks to you in. But most day-to-day life with neighbors, friends, at the market, etc. will be in the local trade language. These languages- like Swahili or Fulfulde- are very few people’s first language, but a whole lot of people’s second language. It is the language of the street, and probably the language you use 90% of the time. In addition, you might know an official language, like French, for school and dealing with government officials, and probably a couple of extra trade languages. Right now, hundreds of these village level languages are dying out, and in many cases it’s only the elderly who speak them with fluency. In some cases, people just aren’t learning them at all. In other cases, people learn it but end up with a simplified, child’s version that lacks the nuance and complexity of the full language. Or they just miss a lot of vocabulary, such that every tree becomes “tree” rather than having a specific name. In other cases, it just gets so mixed in with the trade language that it disappears. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/70 "2011-09-20T13:27:46Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Maybe you’re misremembering, and they said that a lot of the languages that have existed don’t have a written literature? It’s really unusual these days - any time a language asserts itself enough to not be a dialect it gets written down in its own form. Not at all. For Fulfulde is a major trade language spoken across West Africa. It probably has around 14 million speakers. But there is no consistant and widely used writing system. Some people experiment with writing it in Arabic script, other phonetic in Latin script. But there is no system that is widely used. Africa, at least, is full of languages like this. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/71 "2011-09-20T13:34:38Z")
A “trade language,” however, is unlikely to have what we consider a very extensive literature. That is more likely to develop once it exceeds the boundaries of a trade language and becomes something else. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/72 "2011-09-20T19:18:25Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > Are you guys really that floored by the concept of BSing a paper? No, we’re floored by the concept of making such a big deal about it. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/73 "2011-09-20T20:23:20Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Not at all. For Fulfulde is a major trade language spoken across West Africa. It probably has around 14 million speakers. But there is no consistant and widely used writing system. Some people experiment with writing it in Arabic script, other phonetic in Latin script. But there is no system that is widely used. > > Africa, at least, is full of languages like this. Is a trade language what we’d usually consider a ‘language,’ or something less versatile? I do no that some languages have no written form, hence me saying ‘rare,’ not ‘non-existent.’ ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/74 "2011-09-20T20:38:18Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Is a trade language what we’d usually consider a ‘language,’ or something less versatile? It’s exactly like a language. It has no less versatility. It’s just used in specific circumstances. The United States being an almost uniquely monoglot country (not for much longer though?) we often find it difficult to understand how multilingualism is an inborn skill of human beings. It’s very common for there to be social situations in which a single person can be fluent in four or five different languages, which he or she uses in different contexts (sometimes depending on the participants, but not necessarily), smoothly transitioning from one to another, in the same way that African-Americans can code switch. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/75 "2011-09-20T23:47:45Z")
A trade language is just a language spoken across a large area by various ethnic groups, usually to facilitate trade but also just to deal with daily life when a group of ten people in a town might have ten different first languages. Fulfulde, for example, became a “trade language” because its original speakers- the Fulbe- are nomadic cattle traders who about a hundred and fifty years ago managed to launch some pretty successful conquests involving big chunks of land across West Africa. As the dominent and most widespread trade group and political leaders, it became pretty useful for people in the area to learn Fulfulde to talk not just with the Fulbe, but with each other. Sometimes it does get simplified- the Fulfulde I learned had a simplified grammar. But it’s still a “real” language- millions of people use it for most of their daily needs. The original Pulaar (the earlier and more complex form of Fulfulde spoken in places like Guinea) is still very much used, as well. And there is plenty of literary culture. Although it’s not usually a written language, it has probably more than 1,000 years of history and a lot of myth, song, and culture is passed down through the generation. My Fulbe neighbor could recite his family tree and their exploits 7 generations back- pretty amazing. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2011, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798/76 "2011-09-20T23:55:39Z")
And just so you think I’m just fixing on things nobody cares about in Africa- China is FULL of [dying languages](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/world/asia/18manchu.html?pagewanted=all) with rich cultures. It wasn’t long ago that the area that is now China thought of itself as whole bundle of little ethnic enclaves speaking different languages. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that [France](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France) was like that. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-other-countries-languages-teach-literature-analysis/596798.md?page=3)