Really? How many people with either a bachelor’s degree (~38% of US population in 2023) or even graduate degree (~14% of US population) do you think has a working understanding of either classical Latin or Greek? Or Biblical Hebrew if you want to throw that in the pot as well.
Because I’m pretty sure they aren’t specific graduation requirements anywhere other than Classics programs themselves and perhaps a handful of private Catholic universities like Thomas Aquinas that take a classical liberal arts approach to degrees.
Many colleges/programs do require a minimal foreign language component to graduate, but generally only one. If you’re going to make a snobbish/elitist argument (“well, I don’t really consider such people to be properly educated”), that’s fine. But you’re going to be keeping company with a mighty tiny slice of even academia in the US.
One cannot understand Russell and Whitehead, for example, or neither one, for that matter, without understanding English, German, Latin.
The view that, say, mathematics, or logic, can only be properly understood in a particular notation is one I’d consider limited, and historically inept.
After all, let’s say that noted basketballer Kenneth Iverson were correct in that notation may be a tool for thought.
It’s perhaps worth noting what tools for thought were available to titans of the recent past.
How about “now”? Is now a time in your life? Or ten years ago, or twenty, or fifty, or eighty? It’s never been expected for an educated person to know four languages.
You just contradicted yourself. You say that Russell and Whitehead can only be understood in their original notation, and then you say that the notion that something can only be understood in one notation is inept. Besides which, Russell and Whitehead mostly isn’t written in any natural human language. Knowing Latin or English or whatever really won’t help you understand it.
Nobody outside of a historian of math/logic (and arguably not even all of those) needs to be able to read and understand the Principia Mathematica. It may be an important foundational text, but it is 100 years old and I expect has little practical utility outside of pretty narrow interests.
I have been out of academia for a number of years.
I have no idea.
I know “now” people listen to what the young people call “music,” but that doesn’t do much good, does it? I know who Rick Beato is, if that helps.
This is my last salvo, if you want to call it that, but every interesting paper in the hard sciences has included at least an attempt of a summary of previous research. Which is impossible to perform unless using some kind of a crib, or an unpaid assistant, which are unreliable both, unless one were performant or competent oneself.
If one is, as a scientist, uninterested in the thoughts and writings of the theorist one studies, nor in the ideas of his or her contemporaries, I’d be very surprised.
I cannot truly believe an intelligent, curious mind would wish to exclude the very facts from one’s field of enquiry.
If that were so, then Iverson’s notion, or one of my simplified notions that an understanding of original writings is inherently interesting, and who knows what else are all wrong.
Nobody is saying academic departments today do not have (sometimes even multiple) foreign language requirements, but true fluency? In four languages, possibly including Greek and Latin, as a requirement for picking up an undergraduate or graduate mathematics degree? Where have you seen that, even not so recently?
I’ve never known a time now when knowledge of at least four languages, whether dead or spoken, has not been practiced by anyone educated.
Plenty of educated people, or just people, have knowledge of multiple languages. This should not be surprising either. Sometimes it is hard to pin down unequivocally why they learn them; it is not always due to a formal requirement. Sometimes people find it genuinely useful, or even just for fun.
Depends on your field. In Medieval Studies, for example, it is absolutely expected—English, Latin, whatever the local language under study is, and another modern scholarly language such as French or German. Most scholars read them rather than speak them, but most read more than four. Some more comfortably than others, of course.
Likewise, Classicists need Greek, Latin, and English, as well as another scholarly language (usually German). Again, for reading, not speaking.
A lot of scholarhsip doesn’t seem to involve much in-depth reading, so I’m sure you can just use Google Translate for the rare science paper that’s not in English; even there, I see a lot of papers with bilingual abstracts, so people can assess whether it’s worth translating.
The other factor is that people assume because English is the international language of scholarship now, that it always will be. But they thought that about Latin and Greek and Sumerian. If the US and UK continue to make decisions which marginalize them on the international stage, and China or the EU hold course, you’ll start to see English supplanted. Maybe not significantly in our lifetimes, but it’s worth having the means to learn languages just as a back-up plan.
I notice that you keep on circling back to one specific author, Kenneth E. Iverson. Who wrote in English. You keep telling us that competence in any field requires being able to cite all the prior authors, and that that requires fluency in German, French, and Latin. So where are the authors supporting your view who wrote in those languages?
And why, by the way, such a local and provincial set of languages? In the past century, there’s been a heck of a lot more scholarship written in Russian and Chinese than in French or German. Heck, given the way that scholarship in any field accelerates with time, there’s probably more in Russian and Chinese than in French and German combined, over all of history. What’s a person to do, who’s fluent in your four preferred languages, who doesn’t know the major languages of modern scholarship?
Incidentally, Americans tend to underestimate the percentage of people around the world that speak more than one language very fluently. 40% of the people in the world speak just one language very fluently. 43% speak two languages very fluently. 13$ of the people in the world speak three languages very fluently. 3% of the people in the world speak four languages very fluently. 1% of the people in the world speak five or more very fluently.
Of course, as a scientist, Iverson had a different vision of language than you do, it seems.
One is free to disagree, of course, about the merits of exploring the works of those who wrote and thought in such completely esoteric languages like English, German, French, Latin, but I disagree strongly that there is nothing to be gained by reading the statements of the discoverers or postulators of important bodies of work from the authors themselves.
Bing translate is great and all, but it’s a parlor trick.
A bit over 50 years ago my four years of Spanish were enough for MIT. I needed no other languages to graduate. I suppose you and Mr. Iverson think no scientists come out of MIT.
Didn’t need any more for my PhD, and neither did my daughter.
I suspect that many Americans who go to Europe and get by in English don’t really process that English is a second language for many of those they are speaking with.
Older Germans from the West speak English and German, older Germans from the East speak Russian and German.
I said who wrote in those other languages. Iverson’s writing is in English, and so to understand him you only need English. Whom do you need those other languages to understand, and why do you not need any non-western-European languages?
Most things worth reading, in any language, get translated into most of the major world languages, by real, human, professional translators. Who I am sure would not appreciate your calling their job a “parlor trick”.
(1) depends on how you define “worth reading.” Monolingual anglophones sometimes seem to define it circularly as “has been translated into English.” Not saying you, but people I’ve encountered in life.
(2) maybe this doesn’t matter for science, but reading a translation is never quite the same. It will do, but you always lose a little something.
But someone who has only taken a couple years of a language at a university is going to lose a lot more than what he would lose reading a good translation. And a couple years of college language instruction is about the most college graduates are required (except for those majoring in a language).
Well, I would agree that learning a language so poorly that you can’t use it is a waste of time, and that one two two years of language study falls into that category. But I think most schools are doing this badly because English-speakers have the power to offload that intellectual labour onto others.
There’s no reason we have to make the choices we’re making. UWV is just going for the logical next step: “we’re only going through the motions of valuing this crap. Why bother even doing that?”
We could also just decide to fund robust liberal arts education for anyone who wants it, whether they go into sciences or the trades. Oh, wait, my train to Utopia is pulling in—gotta go.
. It may be an important foundational text, but it is 100 years old and I expect has little 