# Should humanities professors be multi-lingual? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 26, 2007, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576 "2007-01-26T16:43:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/21 "2007-01-28T16:54:31Z")
[QUOTE=Sattua] If it isn’t English, they need to learn English. It’s the lingua franca of serious study, and there is no such thing (as suggested above) as an important piece of criticism that is not immediately translated into English. [/QUOTE] This isn’t true, though it’s a nice example of hubris. The first thing that comes to mind is Vladimir Propp, an important Russian theorist whose works took about thirty years to be translated. At the more mundane level, quite a lot of important articles are never translated, though the most ground-breaking ones usually are. [QUOTE=Sattua] Ignoring this fact, it’s pretty pointless to learn a language and say to yourself “now I’m safe! No important piece of criticism will escape me!” because if you learned French, there are approximately 6000 other languages the review might be published in, and knowing French won’t even help you with more than three or four of those. Not that a piece of writing you want to read won’t most likely be in French, German, Russian, Chinese (but which dialect?), or Japanese–or possibly Spanish or Italian, or maybe you want to read the classics in Greek and Latin, or maybe Middle and Old English, or Old Norse, or Irish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic, or Welsh, Pictish, Breton… returning to classics, Aramaic, Accadian, or moving to other parts of the world Arabic or Swahili or Sanskrit, Hindi or Urdu, Classical vs. Modern dialects of every language I’ve already mentioned… need I go on? [/QUOTE] I call hyperbole. There are easily 6000 human languages, but only a tiny fraction of them publish humanities scholarship. All dialects of Chinese have essentially the same writing system\*, so it won’t matter if you speak Cantonese but not Mandarin. If you can read Scots Gaelic you can read Irish Gaelic very easily; if you can read Breton, you can read Welsh with a dictionary. There isn’t a single text preserved in Pictish. But that’s nit-picking. If you merely learn English, French, German, you’ll have mastered the vast proportion of scholarly languages. In point of fact, most foreign-language journals not written in English, French, or German will have a summary in one or more of those languages. [QUOTE=Sattua] It’s nice to have studied a second and third language because it broadens your understanding of the human brain machinery, which is of particular advantage to people working in the humanities. Learning the second language to prevent you from missing important scholarship (unless you’re working in a foreign language discipline)? Silly. [/QUOTE] You cannot learn all languages, obviously, but a working knowledge of the major scholarly languages broadens your reach considerably. There is a ton of reference material in my field that is in German and only German, which is relevant for the study of mainstream modern American culture. Obviously a foreign-language discipline would have additional requirements, but I don’t think a functionally monolingual humanities research scholar is going to be as capable as multilingual one. \*Okay, barring the odd expression and the traditional / simplified characters, but those are minor quibbles ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/22 "2007-01-28T17:06:33Z")
[QUOTE=Oakminster] I had to have two years of a foreign language to get my BA. Passed the courses, but don’t remember much of the language 20 years later. Can you get a BA with no language requirement these days? [/QUOTE] I started to say “yas,” then realized that my BA was 20 years ago as well. But I got it with zero foreign language requirement, although at the time I probably could have made my way through the French exam. None of my graduate programs have had a language requirement either, but they were in Education, not any real subject. ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/23 "2007-01-28T17:26:00Z")
[QUOTE=Dr. Drake] The first thing that comes to mind is Vladimir Propp, an important Russian theorist whose works took about thirty years to be translated. [/QUOTE] The Morphology of the Fairy Tale was published in 1928 and translated into English in the 1950s–it was a completely different world. Think of everything that’s happened in the last eighty years, especially in the arena of communication. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/24 "2007-01-28T17:44:31Z")
The History PhD program that i’m in has different language requirements, depending on your general area of study, and on the specific topic of your own work. Like most people in my program who study United States history, i only had to demonstrate reading competence in one foreign language (in my case, Spanish). Those whose main area of work is Latin America, Europe, Asia, or Africa usually need two, sometimes more, foreign languages. If you do medieval history, it’s usually Latin plus two other languages. Exactly how proficient you need to be at these languages depends on how likely you are to need them. Basically, the language exams themselves (generally taken in the first two years of the program) are usually pretty damn easy. I could have passed my Spanish exam after about one year of undergrad Spanish. But i do twentieth century American history, and the specific topic i do has sources almost exclusively in English. I really don’t need another language for my own current work, and for me the language exam was pretty much just a hoop to jump through. By contrast, some other American historian whose focus was on the colonial and early national history of New Orleans would be well-served by being very competent in French and Spanish, because doing the research would be very difficult otherwise. There are some very important books in my field, books that have been essential to my general learning or to my own research, that could not have been written without a knowledge of multiple languages. ---
**Author:** ![Harriet\_the\_Spry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e56c9b/32.png) [@Harriet\_the\_Spry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harriet_the_Spry)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2007, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/25 "2007-01-28T17:45:26Z")
I would be very much in favor of this requirement. One of the counterarguments made was about those focusing on US literature/art/film/history. The US is so much a nation of immigrants that I feel an understanding of at least one of the languages of people who came to the US would be tremendously valuable. One possible practical application would be reading original source material, such as newspapers or letters home. I have some sympathy for the counterargument that some people have more difficulty mastering a foreign language. I would be surprised, though, if 6 months to a year of living immersed in another country didn’t allow the vast majority to learn the language to an acceptable level. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 9:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/26 "2007-01-29T09:32:43Z")
Frankly, I think everybody who’s college-educated should know a second language at least. Maybe not enough to argue about sports, but enough to understand texts related to their own field and to ask for the bathroom without peeing themselves before people can figure out what’s the foreigner trying to say. My own college (Chem Eng in Spain) required us to be almost-native in English and able to read technical materials with perfect comprehension in either German or French. We all had one year of Latin in High School and a foreign language (Latin doesn’t count, it’s not “foreign” per se); many had two foreign languages and picked up a third in college. So in my case the question is why are some people exempt 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Sunrazor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sunrazor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunrazor)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/27 "2007-01-29T15:11:22Z")
[QUOTE=Darryl Lict] I’m sort of curious. Are you bilingual? Might this color your opinion? [/QUOTE] I’m not. I can catch an odd German word or phrase here and there, but only because I had two years of German in high school and then spent three years in Germany in the Army. That, however, was 30 years ago. No, it just impressed me that my professor could translate French poetry as he read it (realizing, of course, that he’s probably read that same passage every two years for the past thirty or so.) But the guy truly is fluent in French. Maybe I’m more influenced by movies that seem to show professors of the humanities as fluent in some foreign lanugage or another. In graduate school one hears a lot of talk about “scholarly discourse” and “halmarks of true scholarly pursuit.” I just wondered whether others out there thought “true scholars” were fluent in languages other than their native tongues. ---
**Author:** ![Helen\_s\_Eidolon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Helen\_s\_Eidolon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helen_s_Eidolon)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/28 "2007-01-29T15:38:29Z")
In my history grad program, the general requirement is for everyone to demonstrate reading proficiency in one foreign language. The test wasn’t too easy, though - lots of people failed. Beyond that, our advisors can give us individual requirements depending on what is necessary for our area. The Americanists don’t learn anything else, unless they’re Borderlands and they learn Spanish. I, on the other hand, am required to have a reading knowledge of English, French, Italian, German, Latin and ancient Greek. ---
**Author:** ![Cymro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Cymro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cymro)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/29 "2007-01-29T18:27:26Z")
I realise that there are often good reasons for it - but one thing that bothers me about this kind of thing is the eurocentrism of it. I’ve met more than a few people who speak eg English, French and German (through choice, with F+G as L2) and people cream their pants: it’s like, “wow, you’re so international and cosmopolitan”. What about the rest of the world? And from a humanities point of view it wouldn’t be mere political correctness to regard a knowledge of eg classical and modern vernacular Chinese, classical and modern standard Arabic, Sanskrit and Hindi to be incredibly enlightening. And that’s just for starters. So before anyone says that by learning English+a couple of (usually Western) European languages they can ‘learn from the whole world’ or whatever, it’s worth observing that the World extends beyond the North Atlantic. Cymro ---
**Author:** ![rackensack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@rackensack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rackensack)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/30 "2007-01-29T18:53:00Z")
[QUOTE=Cymro] What about the rest of the world? And from a humanities point of view it wouldn’t be mere political correctness to regard a knowledge of eg classical and modern vernacular Chinese, classical and modern standard Arabic, Sanskrit and Hindi to be incredibly enlightening. And that’s just for starters. So before anyone says that by learning English+a couple of (usually Western) European languages they can ‘learn from the whole world’ or whatever, it’s worth observing that the World extends beyond the North Atlantic. [/QUOTE] All that’s as it may be, but the main reasons graduate programs in the humanities impose language proficiency requirements on their students are purely pragmatic: it makes them better prepared to succeed professionally as academics, and hence more likely to enhance the reputation of the institution where they got their advanced degree. In some fields, it’s just not optional to be able to deal with primary sources in the original language – for European history professors, Latin, French, and German are practically essential for many periods; ditto for many periods of literature. The second main reason, as previously mentioned, is to ensure that the candidate is able to cope with important publications in their field that may not be available in English. In medieval literature and the sort of fields that used to be referred to as “philology”, there’s always been tons of secondary material in German that hasn’t been translated, or from which only excerpts have been translated, etc. The same is true in many fields of history. To become a leading authority in a many fields, it’s essential to be able to cope with books and academic journal articles in other languages. A program that turns out Ph.D.s who can’t do that risks having its products underachieve relative to those from other institutions – which means that it’s harder to attract top students, harder to attract top faculty, and perhaps most important, harder to attract funding dollars both internally and externally. If the newly minted Ph.D.s issuing forth from an institution have a familiarity with non-Western European languages and cultures and are more broad-minded and creative thinkers as a result, so much the better, but that’s not the prime mover behind language proficiency requirements. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/31 "2007-01-29T19:09:56Z")
These days, outside the Indo-European continuum, Chinese would be a very good idea, even more than Japanese. What is the most common third language\* I hear on the streets of Toronto? Chinese. With Punjabi, Hindi, Spanish, and Italian as close competitors. And, of course, Esperanto has its niche as a bridge language to a lot of different cultures the world over. I have communicated with people from Finland, Brazil, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Russia, the States, Poland, Germany, Japan, and Korea using it. Since almost everyone learns it as a second language, there is no ‘non-native-speaker disadvantage’, and we can meet as equals. Plus, it’s easier to learn than French. And there has been a lot of literature translated into it or written in it. Example: Spomenka Shtimec’s “Nightbook of the Croatian War”, a heart-rending tale of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. As far as I know, it’s never been translated into English. But then I’m biased about Esperanto. 🙂 Plus, learning a second language wards off dementia! [sub]\*languages other than French and English, the national languages where I live.[/sub] ---
**Author:** ![Cymro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Cymro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cymro)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/32 "2007-01-29T19:13:32Z")
[QUOTE=Sunspace] And, of course, Esperanto has its niche as a bridge language to a lot of different cultures the world over. I have communicated with people from Finland, Brazil, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Russia, the States, Poland, Germany, Japan, and Korea using it. Since almost everyone learns it as a second language, there is no ‘non-native-speaker disadvantage’, and we can meet as equals. Plus, it’s easier to learn than French. And there has been a lot of literature translated into it or written in it. Example: Spomenka Shtimec’s “Nightbook of the Croatian War”, a heart-rending tale of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. As far as I know, it’s never been translated into English. But then I’m biased about Esperanto. 🙂 Plus, learning a second language wards off dementia! [sub]\*languages other than French and English, the national languages where I live.[/sub] [/QUOTE] I call shenanigans - Esperanto offers a massive native speaker advantage to speakers of European languages. Cymro ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/33 "2007-01-29T19:21:26Z")
[QUOTE=Sunrazor] I’m studying for my master’s degree in English . . . Shouldn’t college professors be required to be multi-lingual? [/QUOTE] When I took my Masters in English, two second languages were required. So much of English is drawn from other languages (e.g. German, French and Latin), and so much of the history and culture of England is intertwined with other European nations, that if one were only to understand English, one would be missing out on a great deal. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/34 "2007-01-29T19:24:56Z")
[QUOTE=Cymro] I call shenanigans - Esperanto offers a massive native speaker advantage to speakers of European languages. [/QUOTE] That’s not quite what I was saying… apart from the very small number of people who learn it from childhood, everyone learns it as a second language. Thus the great majority of Esperanto speakers are on equal ground as speakers of a second language. ---
**Author:** ![Cymro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Cymro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cymro)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/35 "2007-01-29T20:16:59Z")
[QUOTE=Sunspace] That’s not quite what I was saying… apart from the very small number of people who learn it from childhood, everyone learns it as a second language. Thus the great majority of Esperanto speakers are on equal ground as speakers of a second language. [/QUOTE] True, but some of those are on more equal ground than others, aren’t they? Given that Esperanto’s vocabulary and grammar is drawn exclusively from Central and Western European languages, doesn’t this massively disadvantage speakers of Chinese, South American or African languages, for example? > [@wiki](#): > > There are two common defenses to this: One is to admit that Esperanto is not absolutely neutral in the sense that everyone can learn it with equal effort, but that nevertheless it is fairer than the current system, since everyone makes a step towards common ground, even if the steps are not equally sized. > > Critics reply that the steps required vary substantially, and that Esperanto merely substitutes European-language speakers for English speakers as the advantaged group. Cymro ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/36 "2007-01-29T22:40:16Z")
[QUOTE=Cymro] So before anyone says that by learning English+a couple of (usually Western) European languages they can ‘learn from the whole world’ or whatever, it’s worth observing that the World extends beyond the North Atlantic. [/QUOTE] Which is a different way of saying what I was trying to say. For professional purposes and functioning in your job as an academic, unless you are working in a foreign language field, knowing English will let you read as much as you need to read. Arguing “oh no! You need English and French and German! THEN you can read as much as you want to read!” is silly–one’s still missing a \*certain percentage \* of literature, just like one was when reading only English. For thirty years one would still have missed Vladimir Propp, for example. Having said that, I do think that French and German are nice “introductory foreign languages” for English speakers, because English is a Germanic language with a large Romance vocabulary. It’s good to cut your teeth on something vaguely familiar, before you jump into the Twilight Zone of another language family. Didn’t list my credentials in this thread: Ph.D. in linguistics, for which I had to demonstrate proficiency in two languages, structural knowlege of a third, and do field work with a fourth. ---
**Author:** ![Helen\_s\_Eidolon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Helen\_s\_Eidolon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helen_s_Eidolon)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/37 "2007-01-30T00:31:41Z")
**Sattua** , at least in my field, that’s not true. There is a huge quantity of very important, untranslated secondary material in French, German and Italian. My ability to read French and Italian has helped me a lot, and I’m limited by my (current) inability to read German. On the other hand, I have two articles I desperately need to read in Russian. Not sure yet what to do about that. ---
**Author:** ![lizardling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f4b2a3/32.png) [@lizardling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lizardling)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/38 "2007-01-30T03:52:20Z")
English major with a BA earned in the last decade. My program required one year of a foreign language. I’m kind of sorry to say that I skated by taking ASL – it was the first year it was offered as a true foreign language. I kind of wish I’d taken Indonesian as that’s my heritage, but that’s obscure enough that it wouldn’t have done me any good. But I did take a quarter of Chaucer in the original, which rocked. I still have my hardback phone book-size text, complete with pencilled notes in the margin about what word meant what. By the end of the quarter, I could almost tootle along and get the idea without having to have recourse to glossaries. Almost. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/39 "2007-01-30T07:37:11Z")
I had to study a foreign language for my BA in Comparative Literature. If I wanted an MA, I would have had to demonstrate competency in that language (or any other) by completing a certain amount of unit credits using the second language. At the time I was in school, I think that was 15 units, which would be about 5 regular semester classes, or maybe 4 with a lab/lecture requirement. For a PhD I would imagine the requirements would be stiffer, perhaps a third language and more units on top of that. From what I understand, up until about 40 years ago you weren’t considered well-educated unless you’d studied at least Latin, and preferably ancient Greek along with it. Those were the minimums. You’d also better have studied a living language—French and German were good choices—or deal with the egghead equivalent of getting sand kicked in your face when someone quoted Voltaire or Goethe and you had no clue what he was talking about. ---
**Author:** ![Sunrazor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sunrazor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunrazor)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2007, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576/40 "2007-01-31T03:33:04Z")
[QUOTE=Muffin] When I took my Masters in English, two second languages were required. So much of English is drawn from other languages (e.g. German, French and Latin), and so much of the history and culture of England is intertwined with other European nations, that if one were only to understand English, one would be missing out on a great deal. [/QUOTE] Bingo! When I started this program I thought I’d at least be translating Olde English into modern English. Nope! Just studying a bunch’o’literature and writin’ papers. Nothing on the history of the language, nothing on how other languages fed into it, not even a scrap of Gaelic or Celtic. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-humanities-professors-be-multi-lingual/389576.md?page=1)