"Don Phillipson" <d.phillipsonSPAMBLOCK@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> "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:
There's a difference between "the other official language of the
country" (to be a good citizen) and "a language other than your mother
tongue" (to be a scholar). I presume from the way you phrase it that
a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew (or, for that matter,
Spanish, Mandarin, or Swedish) wouldn't have satisfied the
requirement.
> and first year university required passing at last one language
> course.
Was that your university, all universities in Ontario, all
universities in Canada, or universities in general in the
English-speaking world.
My university (Stanford), in the '80s, when I was there, required a
year of a language at the college level (or equivalent), but it didn't
have to happen during the first year. "Equivalent" typically meant
either three years at the high school level or passing an exam, and
nearly all of the people I knew came in having satisfied the
requirement.
Looking at their current web site, this requirement is still there.
> 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.
I thought it was "usually required" until the 1970s.
> 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.
Again, this looks like a specifically Canadian issue. Was the
"federal incursion" based on "they want kids to have to study some
foreign language" or "they want to push that specific other language"?
>> > 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.
And in the '70s, when I was going to school, it was typically up to
the department. Looking at my old _Courses and Degrees_, when I
graduated in 1987, for a Ph.D. in math, you needed two of French,
German, and Russian. Chemistry appears to have required one (perhaps
two) of those three. Biology required one of (usually) French or
German. For music, you needed German and either French or Italian
"plus any other language necessary to research in the candidate's
field of specialization".
If this has been relaxed, I suspect that it's more a reflection of the
increasing use of English in international academic writing.
> 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.
Clearly, if you're working in a field in which im****tant works are
written in a language other than English, it's im****tant to be able to
read them in the original languages. But proficiency in "a language"
isn't necessarily going to help a whole lot.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum
+------------------------------------
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