On 08/09/07 02:51, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
> "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.
When I was at high school, the rule was that the choice of subjects had
to include at least one "science" subject and one "humanities" subject.
In my case the humanities subject was French, but many of my
contem****aries got through school with no more than a couple of years'
study of a second language.
When I was a student at Melbourne University (late 1960s), there was a
rule that for a Master's degree you had to pass an examination in at
least one foreign language, and two languages for a Ph.D. As it turned
out, I did my postgraduate studies elsewhere, but I did check out the
requirements at Melbourne. I believe that I could have passed the
examinations in "Scientific French", "Scientific German", and
"Scientific Russian" with almost no study, because the examinations
simply required translation from the other language into English, and
dictionaries were permitted in the exams. I think that even that slight
requirement was abolished a few years later.
As it turned out, my postgraduate studies did require me to read papers
in French and in German. I had studied French at school, but my
knowledge of German was almost nonexistent. It didn't matter. For highly
technical papers packed with mathematics, a dictionary is close to being
superfluous. Reading mathematical papers in Russian was a little
trickier - but essential, because the Russians have always been ahead of
the rest of the world in mathematics - but a half-year course in Russian
from someone in the mathematics department was sufficient to deal with
that. I still know practically no Russian, but I know how to use a
dictionary, and in technical subjects that's good enough.
By the way, someone who was eminent in my own field (systems theory)
spent the later part of his career translating some key papers from
Russian into English. It shocked a few people to discover that so much
advanced research was going on without ever having appeared in English;
there was a general feeling that all the good stuff would appear in
English anyway, but that general feeling turned out to be wrong.
--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
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