"Evan Kirshenbaum" <kirshenbaum@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:ejhae7wi.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "Don Phillipson" <d.phillipsonSPAMBLOCK@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>
> > From mediaeval times until 1970 or 1980, it was generally accepted
> > that every scholar must have at least a good reading knowledge of
> > two or more other languages than his mother-tongue. High school
> > graduation usually required proof by examination of competence in at
> > least one such language
>
> I realize that you're writing from an officially bilingual country,
> but has this ever (at least in the 20th century) really been the case
> elsewhere, at least in the sense of "if you don't pass this test you
> don't graduate"? I certainly don't remember my parents talking about
> any such requirement.
Up to the 1960s high school graduation in Ontario, Canada, required
passing French at some adequate level: and first year university
required passing at last one language course. Most of my freshman
friends in 1959-60 chose French, and I was surprised to find they
could not read French for pleasure at this level.
At this date Quebec high schools had no language requirement
for high school graduation (from English or French schools) and
there was a movement afoot (from the "Bilingualism and Biculturalism"
Royal Commission of the 1960s) to make qualification in the
other language a requirement of high school graduation and
university admission in every province. This was resisted as a
"federal incursion" into provincial rights, and what actually
happened was that the independent movement for educational
reform led to both high schools and universities abandoning
their earlier language requirements.
> > and the PhD degree required proof of at least two. These
> > qualifications were generally abandoned late in the 20th century:
> > but the idea survives, that scholar****p requires competence in
> > languages.
>
> Which, of course, brings up the reason that it was expected that
> scholars be able to read and write in other languages: those other
> languages were the lingua francas of academic (and commercial)
> discourse. Today, that discourse is overwhelmingly in English, so
> there's less draw to other languages (and more draw to people with
> other mother tongues learning English).
It may be true that English dominates overwhelmingly today: but
it did not in the 1970s when language qualifications were abandoned.
The foregoing also wholly omits the idea of reading professionally
in another language so as to pick up ideas likely to be omitted
in English. English-speaking disciples of Lacan, Barthes and
Foucault started to go badly wrong only when they focussed
solely on English translations of their prophets' pronunciamentos.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
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