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Anna Della Subin’s NYRB review [archived] of Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut enlightened me about a modernist movement I was only barely aware of (though of course I’d heard of Adonis):

Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings is the story of how Arabic made it new. Beirut has been overlooked in classic histories of modernism, yet Creswell, a professor of comparative literature at Yale, […] has remedied this with eloquence and erudition in his study of how a group of exiles, iconoclasts, and émigrés—al-Khal, Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj foremost among them—radically transformed Arabic poetry. In addition to abandoning traditional forms, the Beiruti modernists sought to purify poetry of the politics that kept it mired in its own time and place. At a moment when intellectuals across the Middle East were divided along nationalist, Pan-Arabist, monarchist, and Marxist lines, [the avant-garde quarterly magazine] Shi‘r [‘Poetry’] was avowedly nonpartisan, and talk of politics was discouraged at the magazine’s weekly literary salons. The question of what it meant to write poetry without politics, and how one might achieve this in a fractured city on the verge of civil war, is threaded throughout Creswell’s impressive book.

This study also speaks to the asymmetries, still with us, of the midcentury modernist project and its quest to create a world literature. Encountering Europe’s literary powerbrokers in Rome, the Beiruti poets were surprised to find their ideas met with reproach. In his response to Adonis, Spender chastised him for his “complete disregard for the ancient heritage of Arabic poetry,” finding his “demolition of poetic traditions” too “extremist,” according to the Arabic transcript of the conference. Although Spender criticized British poets for provincialism in dwelling too much on their own pleasant isles, non-European poets were expected to retain “local color,” Creswell writes, if they desired to participate in the circuits of world literature. The Beiruti poets sought to escape the confinements of region. Yet their European interlocutors, fearing the kind of standardized, monolithic culture they attributed to their Soviet antagonists, demanded that nonwhite writers preserve and perform their ethnic distinctiveness, to write in culturally “authentic” modes. By refusing to conform to entrenched rules of how the poet should engage with identity, ideology, and heritage, the Shi‘r group challenged the burgeoning international literary culture.

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Janet Chernela, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, has a thought-provoking article “Language in an ontological register: Embodied speech in the Northwest Amazon of Colombia and Brazil” (Language & Communication 63 [Nov. 2018]: 23-32); here’s the Abstract:

Speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages in Brazil and Colombia construe linguistic differences as indices of group identity, intrinsic to a complex ontology in which language is a consubstantial, metaphysical product—a ‘substance’ in the development of the person. Through speech, speakers of the same language signal a corporality based in theories of shared ancestry and mutual belonging while speakers of different languages signal difference. For Tukanoans, then, one creates one’s self in the act of speaking. These ontological beliefs underlie speech practices, influencing language maintenance and contributing to one of the most extreme examples of multilingualism reported in the literature.

It’s short (only ten pages); I’ll quote a few bits here and let you follow the link for the rest (I delete parenthetical references throughout):

The Vaupés River and its tributaries form the center of the Eastern Tukanoan Sprachbund, site of one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. In this area of some 110,000 km² — a region larger than Denmark — about 40,000 residents speak languages from four indigenous language families: Eastern Tukanoan, Arawakanan, Tupi, and Nadahup. About a third of that number (20 or so language groups) are speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages, including Desana, Piratapuia, Tuyuca, Barasana, Baré and Kotiria, whose numbers range from 10 (Yurutí) to 6151 (Tukano).

We are concerned here with speakers of Kotiria, a northern branch of Eastern Tukanoan, whose 1400 speakers are located along the banks of the Vaupés River from Santa Cruz in Colombia to Arara in Brazil. […] Kotiria villagers throughout this region speak indigenous languages in their everyday lives, with Portuguese and Spanish being the preferred languages with itinerant merchants, missionaries, and other outsiders. […]

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From W. B. Stanford’s The Sound of Greek: Studies in the Greek Theory and Practice of Euphony (University of California Press, 1967), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

In our world of printed books we mostly study and enjoy literature in silence. We do sometimes hear the sound of poetry and of good prose in the classroom and in the theatre, and when we listen to the radio. But most of our literary experience, as adults at any rate, is silent. We sit in a library or at home; our eyes move quickly over black marks on a white page; and our mind takes in an author’s thoughts and images. When we were children at school, our teachers taught us to aim at rapid reading: the sooner we got through the elementary stage of sounding the words as we went along, the better, they said. In any educational book on the psychology of reading you will probably find a section called something like “Training to Decrease Vocalization.”¹

We take all this for granted, and undoubtedly we gain great benefits from this silent, rapid reading. So when we are studying the classical literatures of Greece and Rome we generally aim at reading them in just the same way. We use our eyes, but not our ears and our voices.² We are what has been aptly called “eye-philologists,” not “ear-philologists.”³

¹ See, e.g., John Anthony O’Brien, Silent Reading (New York, 1921).

² Cf. A.W. Verrall, The Bacchants of Euripides and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1910) 246: “The habit of silent reading has made us slow to catch the sound of what is written. And moreover, used to language and poetry constructed on principles not merely different from the Greek, but diametrically opposed, our attention, even if given to the sound, brings us no natural and instinctive report. To logic, rhetoric, pathos we are alive; and upon these heads the tragic poets are criticised; but as to noise we will not notice it, not even if we are bidden and bidden again.”

³ I take the terms “eye-philologists” and “ear-philologists” from [Otto] Jespersen [Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin] 23 f. How little the ear counts among modern rhetoricians is exemplified in the neglect of all matters of verbal sound except rhythm in so full a manual as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric (New York, 1949).

This continues to astonish me, though it’s not the first time it’s been brought to my attention. Subvocalizing is so ingrained in me it’s hard to imagine reading without it, and impossible to imagine someone thinking they could appreciate poetry (of all things) without on some level hearing the sound of it (for which it exists, or existed until modern experimental verse). It took me years of concentrated effort to develop the ability to hear the meters of Greek and Latin verse, but once I did I could instantly tell how a line of verse worked and detect if it was off. I pity people who deal professionally with it and yet have to laboriously count the morae or whatever it is they do instead of using the senses they were born with and that poets depend on. “Training to Decrease Vocalization” forsooth!

Colin Burrow has a magnificent review essay [archived] on William Empson in the latest LRB that I can’t resist quoting chunks of; I only wish AJP (who just last year said “Colin Burrow is God”) were still here to enjoy it:

Empson was famously chucked out of Magdalene College, Cambridge, when condoms were found in his room. He spent the early part of his academic career teaching in Japan and China. He was a staggering drinker and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly against his own brilliantly simulated atmospherics of squeaks and high-pitched whistles modulated through a slightly damp moustache’. Empson later explained that in order to be sure he was audible he had removed his teeth before reading.

That rudimentary error about how best to get people to attend to what you are saying was not untypical of Empson. But he was – bear with me here – very good at metaphorically taking out his false teeth in order to make himself understood. His critical writing combines forensic analysis of alternative senses (in which his critical teeth grind a text into fine particles) with deliberately wide and vague gestures to the beyond (teeth out, evocative mumbling through a slightly damp moustache). Empson would quite often (and ‘quite’ is one of the function words about which he writes particularly well) grind through a list of alternative interpretations, set out with pseudo-mathematical precision, and then gesture off into the void of the unknowable with a ‘sort of’ to suggest that none of his carefully listed alternative interpretations could quite capture the overall effect of a given phrase. He does this in the passage which poor Madge had to read out to her blind professor when he interrupts his list of all the things Donne might mean in order to talk of ‘a different sort of feeling’. As he said in Some Versions of Pastoral, ‘probably a half-magical idea is the quickest way to the truth.’ […]

It’s hard to say that there is a typical Empson essay, since he wrote about so many things. His posthumous publications include books on images of the Buddha and on the role of the censor in shaping Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – a wildly entertaining account ruined by Empson’s conviction that the haphazard processes of Elizabethan censorship resembled those of 20th-century totalitarianism, which they did not. He also wrote about Alice in Wonderland, Marvell’s relationship with his housekeeper, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and made parenthetical references to more or less everything else. Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the air, but when he takes another swig from his hipflask and guns the accelerator, your head gets thrown back so far that you just have to make yourself enjoy the ride – even if you’re not quite sure you’re going where you want to go.

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Joel at Far Outliers posts an excerpt from R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale UP, 2012) that shows a language-related aspect of human insanity:

In each of the expelling countries, governments, residents, and ecclesiastical authorities struggled mightily to eradicate all indications that Germans had ever been present. As Edvard Beneš urged his compatriots, “We must de-Germanize our republic … names, regions, towns, customs—everything that can possibly be de-Germanized must go.” Place names were changed overnight, often by direct translation into the new language (e.g., the substitution of “Zielona Góra” for “Grünberg”); statues and memorials demolished; and fanciful local histories composed that airbrushed into oblivion centuries of German presence. “In Wrocław the government had special teams that roved for years painting over and chiseling out German inscriptions. Derelict German cemeteries were converted into parks, and headstones were used to line ditches and sewers.” The most ambitious—and unrealistic—attempt to accomplish this objective was an order by Commandant Srević of the Banat military region in Yugoslavia that all German signs on buildings be removed within twelve hours, on pain of the immediate execution of the German occupants. Nor was this a passing phase. As late as 1989, applications for visitors’ visas to Poland from Germans born in the Recovered Territories were routinely rejected if the applicant used the former German place name when stating his or her place of birth. The de-Germanization effort extended not only to penalizing the use of the German language, but to putting pressure on residents to abandon German-sounding personal names. The success of the campaign, however, was mixed. Cultural and sometimes physical clashes ensued between settler Poles and many of the indigenes of the Recovered Territories, who had absorbed over the years a high degree of Germanization. New place names could also be rejected by the local population, who sometimes “boycotted new names and even broke road signs that identified the new name…. For them, place name changes on the lands in which they had been living were never the processes of re-Polonisation, but rather Polonisation against their will.”

Consigning evidence of German settlements to George Orwell’s “memory hole” was one thing; putting self-sustaining communities in their place entirely another.

Orderly and Humane sounds like an excellent, if deeply depressing, book.

It occurred to me that the phrase “bad enough” must be a difficult one for learners of English. It’s used in two different ways, nicely illustrated by the first two hits that came up on a LH site search:

1. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the words are Grecified Russian to start with, their current names are Byelorussian or Polish that look different again.

2. The badger definition is bad enough to be a hoax.

It’s also interesting that there’s no contrasting “good enough” in the first usage (though of course there is in the second: The badger definition is good enough it could go straight into a dictionary). I made up a sample sentence and had GT render it into Russian, German, and French:

It’s bad enough to have a cold, but to get the flu as well is even worse.

Простуда – это плохо, но еще хуже – заболеть гриппом.

Es ist schlimm genug, eine Erkältung zu haben, aber auch eine Grippe zu bekommen, ist noch schlimmer.

C’est déjà assez grave d’avoir un rhume, mais attraper aussi la grippe, c’est encore pire.

Which confirms my thought that Russian does not have an equivalent construction (which makes Boris Badenov an especially ironic name). My German Sprachgefühl is not, er, good enough to tell me if GT’s version is idiomatic or if the “genug” construction works the same way; thoughts on that or any other aspects of this issue are (as always) welcome.

D Vance Smith writes for Aeon about a little-known script:

Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years. Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared.

Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century. But even after 400 years, it hasn’t been fully deciphered. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. That fate, of course, is not unique. It’s something that’s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he’d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. It’s not currently on display.

But Libyco-Berber also reveals a more insidious kind of destruction, an epistemological violence inflicted by even the best-intentioned Europeans. There are numerous stories of badly educated, arrogant Europeans insisting that Africans not only never did, but never could, write books. Even as sensitive a philosopher as the French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who had deep personal ties to Algeria, and who supported the Berber/Amazigh cultural movement, could essentially make the same assumption. He insisted that the Kabyle people, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber. Bourdieu’s is a cautionary tale for intellectuals who are committed to social activism. The passion – the need – to do what’s right is all too often steered by the conviction that, precisely because we’re intellectuals, we know what’s right. For Bourdieu, for example, the very ability to think, to reflect about what’s right, is tied to literacy.

He goes on to talk about Punic:
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Ilaria Parogni has an excellent New York Times piece (archived link) about name signs in ASL which benefits mightily from “interactive” technology — you can see the various names mentioned being signed, and there are a number of very entertaining video clips with Deaf people telling the stories of their names in ASL (with subtitles). It begins:

Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, five women joined forces with a mission: assigning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris a name sign, the equivalent of a person’s name in American Sign Language. The women, Ebony Gooden, Kavita Pipalia, Smita Kothari, Candace Jones and Arlene Ngalle-Paryani — as Black and Indian members of the “capital D Deaf community” (a term used by some deaf people to indicate that they embrace deafness as a cultural identity and communicate primarily through ASL) — felt it was important that the selection of Ms. Harris’s name sign be the result of an inclusive and democratic process. […] Ms. Ngalle-Paryani’s own submission won: a hand gesture that involves rotating your wrist externally as your thumb, index and middle finger unfurl open. The Kamala Harris name sign draws inspiration, among other things, from the sign for “lotus flower” — the direct translation of the word “Kamala” in Sanskrit — and incorporates the number 3 to underscore Ms. Harris’s trifecta of firsts. “It’s truly a badge of honor,” Ms. Ngalle-Paryani said, signing, of the selection of her submission. “I really do feel that it fits Madam Vice President.”

A couple more excerpts:

Benjamin J. Bahan, a professor in the Deaf Studies department at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the nation’s only liberal arts university devoted to deaf people, said that “name signs usually come from parents who are deaf.” If a child does not receive one growing up, perhaps because he or she was raised by hearing parents, he added, the name may be assigned at a later stage.

As people go through life, they may receive new name signs that replace earlier ones. If they have a strong connection to other countries, they may also receive name signs in other sign languages, such as Japanese Sign Language or Russian Sign Language. (Vice President Harris was recently assigned a name sign in British Sign Language.)

[…]

Dr. Supalla explains in his book that while originally, name signs were reserved for deaf people, the growing number of hearing people who use ASL and regularly interact with deaf people has meant that many non-deaf individuals today have name signs. Even so, hearing people may never assign a name sign. As Ms. Ngalle-Paryani noted, only a deaf person may do so. […] Dr. Padden said that recently, deaf people have become more engaged in the process of selecting name signs for hearing politicians and well-known individuals. It’s a way for people to acknowledge those individuals “and show alliance with them,” she said.

The whole thing is enlightening and enjoyable; hat tip to Toddles’ MeFi post, from which I got the link, and a nod to michael farris, who explained the basics at LH a decade ago.

I’m getting close to the end of Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf), and though it’s been a tough slog, I’ll be sorry when it’s over. I’m on the last of the four sections of poems by one of the narrators, the hunter/poet/artist Yakov, who may or may not be the son of the other narrator, the knife-sharpener/cripple/drunk Ilya, whose amatory relations (tangled) and crutch (theft thereof) form the main points of such plot as there is; the poem I’m posting about is called “Паклен,” and it’s both splendid poetry and splendidly untranslatable — what I said about Pasternak here applies equally to Sokolov: he “boils down the resources of Russian too idiosyncratically and completely; there’s not enough that can be carried over in the leaky bucket of translation.” And yet Alexander Boguslawski, who took on the almost unimaginable task of translating a novel routinely called “untranslatable,” had to give it a try. I hate to complain about the result of that labor, especially when it’s been invaluable to me, but alas, complaining is what I do, and just as I moaned about his calling a shotgun a rifle here, I’m going to gripe about his rendering of this lovely set of verses.

One problem is that he has no ear for poetry, but he can’t help that. He would have done better to just translate for sense and effect, ignoring the verse forms, but he wanted to go whole hog, so he winds up with un-English phrasings like “By the way, all go to hell” or (in another poem) “Hung like sticking-out earlobe/ Weightless crescent.” But even within those parameters, there are a couple of big problems. The poem focuses on one of the main themes of the novel, the difficulty of telling X from Y. It’s right there in the title: “between dog and wolf” translates inter canem et lupum, a Latin phrase referring to twilight, when you can’t tell one canid from the other. One of the subsidiary characters is called sometimes Fyodor, sometimes Pyotr, and sometimes Yegor. And in this poem we have a difficulty in distinguishing between two trees, a неклен [neklen] (Acer tataricum, the Tatar maple) and a клен [klyon] (the regular old maple); there are half a dozen variants of this couplet:

Неклен. А в сущности – клен.
Клен. А прищуришься – неклен.

Tatar maple. But in essence a maple.
Maple. But if you squint, a Tatar maple.

The last four lines of the poem are:

Неклен. Наклюкался – клен.
Клен. Оклемаешься – неклен.
Сумерками ослеплен,
Медленной тлею облеплен.

Tatar maple. When you get really drunk, a maple.
Maple. When you recover, a Tatar maple.
Blinded by twilight,
Swarming with slow plant lice.

This shows both Sokolov’s magical way with sounds (kl-n, kl-m, sl-pl-n, dl-n, tl, l-pl-n) and the importance of booze in the novel. Now, of course English has no equivalent of the close-but-no-cigar клен and неклен (which looks like ‘not-maple’ and is etymologically probably just that), so Boguslawski has chosen to go with apple and crab(apple):

Apple. But in essence — crab.
Crab. But look closer — apple.

I don’t think this works, not least because “crab” and “apple” don’t sound anything alike, but I can’t do any better, so I won’t give him a hard time. No, what I’m complaining about is the way he translates the title, “Spackle.” He uses the same word later to render “Рвань по фамилии Паклин?”: “The trash nicknamed Spackle?” In the first place, a фамилия is a surname, not a nickname, and there is in fact a surname Paklin, derived from пакля ‘oakum, tow (bundle of fibers).’ But never mind, if he wants to call it a nickname and render it Spackle on a phonetic basis, let him. The problem is that the title of the poem is an entirely different (though similar-looking) word, паклен, which happens to be a synonym of неклен ‘Tatar maple.’ I don’t know whether he didn’t know the word or was simply seduced by the similarity into mashing the two together, but the outcome is awful: a brilliant synthesynonym that sums up the poem is turned into a mystifying pseudo-nickname that delivers nothing to the eager reader.

And the worst of it is that паклен is a really interesting word! For some reason it’s not included in Vasmer even though it’s in Dahl, but it looks to me like it must be another example of the nominal prefix па-, so that паклен has the same relation to клен ‘maple’ as пасынок ‘stepson’ does to сын ‘son.’ Isn’t that neat? Though I speak, as always, under correction; I am merely an enthusiastic amateur, and it may be that a genuine etymologist will have good reasons for rejecting this pretty hypothesis.

Addendum. I’ve finished the novel, and instead of doing a summary post I think I’ll quote the description provided by Olga Matich in her “Саша Соколов. Три поразительных и очень разных романа” [Sasha Sokolov: Three striking and very different novels] (Новый Журнал, номер 300, 2020); the translation is mine, and you can see the original Russian at that link (beginning “Если «Школа» в каком-то отношении вытекает”):

If School [for Fools] in some respects has its source in youth prose [e.g., Vasily Aksyonov], Dog can be correlated with so-called village prose [e.g., Valentin Rasputin]. But it is alien to the moralizing of the village writers; its emotional focus is the doomed existence of its unhappy characters. As I wrote over twenty years ago, the novel brings to mind rather the modernist prose of Pilnyak in the 1920s, which described village life as filled with violence. Take his novella Mother Earth (1925), which has the howl of the wolf as a leitmotiv, as well as the woman tanner Arina, doomed to death. Sokolov also has a heroine Arina (Orina), and the wolf and dog flow together inter canem et lupum – the time of day when it is impossible to distinguish a dog from a wolf – in a single image.

The novel’s action takes place in an intermediate space along the two shores of the Itil/Wolf river [the fictional Volga] in the villages Gorodnishche, Bydogoshch, and others. The characters of Dog are hunters, grinders, beggars, cripples, and thieves; some of them transform from one to another. In terms of genre, Dog is in part an epistolary novel in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The narrative is characterized by a plaiting and replaiting of words […] Dog abounds in paronomasia and repetition of sounds, often punning, founded on coincidences in meaning and sound.

[…] The novel’s reader often gets lost in its storytelling and verbal labyrinths; on one hand, trying to understand their meaning, on the other, seeking an exit from them. Leona Toker calls the book “a spiderweb of words” […]

A few years ago we discussed the idea of abolishing foreign language requirements, but that focused on education at the high-school level; Victor Mair at the Log posts about the graduate level, taking off from a tweet by Bryan Van Norden:

My sense is that most doctoral programs in philosophy in the US have abandoned language requirements. This reflects the mistaken beliefs that the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy outside the Anglophone world are worthless.

Mair continues, “I asked my colleagues in Classical Studies what the situation was like here. Ralph Rosen responded thus:”

Well, Princeton is really just catching up to what has become the norm in most places. Penn was a pioneer in this— we crafted a no-languages-required major almost 25 years ago, and it was one of the best things we did for a variety of reasons we can discuss some time if you’re interested. I might add that ‘despite’ having a major such as this, students can still get all the training they would like in Greek and Latin if they’re interested. There are fewer of these choosing this language path than the non-language Classical Studies major, but they all interact as one community dedicated to a common interest in the pre-modern Mediterranean and its reception. One shouldn’t forget, after all, that ‘Classical Studies’ comprises a lot of quite diverse fields (archaeology, history, art history, reception studies, philosophy, in addition to Greek and Latin). Graduate study, of course, is another matter; but that article from Princeton was reporting changes only their undergraduate major, to align it better with disciplinary norms (and presumably to attract more students, who remain interested in the classical world, but for whatever reason, do not want to commit to language study).

Mair is upset:

I’m sure that every single one of my colleagues in East Asian Languages and Civilizations would find it absolutely inconceivable that we could offer a major or minor without heavy language requirements (it’s built right into the name of our department). In our department, we wrangled over whether the language requirement should be six courses or eight courses. Language study is at the heart of all that we do, and most practitioners of East Asian studies programs believe that you can’t really understand East Asian civilization and culture if you don’t know the languages.

Will EALC one day go the way of Classics at Penn and Princeton?

But of course there’s a big difference between a department that explicitly features languages and one focused on a subject matter like philosophy that can perfectly well be studied in translation (if you disagree, you have to explain where to draw the line between those philosophies that are worthy of being studied in the original and those that aren’t). There are good comments by several LH regulars; J.W. Brewer writes:

It is annoyingly hard to google up good data quickly, but my impression, bolstered with some recollections of having looked at decent data a few years ago, is that the percentage of US high school graduates that have studied some foreign language before graduation (and thus before entering college) is significantly higher these days than it was in most former times (in really former times the percentage was higher but that’s when most Americans didn’t finish high school).

And I tend to agree with Y, who says:

My natural tendency is to be sympathetic—yay, languages—but I can see their point. An archaeologist, I imagine, could be satisfied with the available translations of the works of classical antiquity, and leave the rare inscription or papyrus to the specialists. This is very unlike Chinese or Japanese studies, where most of the primary sources are untranslated, as is the vast body of secondary literature, which is still being generated.

I used to be much more reflexively in favor of language instruction, but (though obviously I still think it’s a Good Thing) I’m now more sympathetic to the idea of not requiring it for the study of things that don’t inherently involve languages. If you need German, or Chinese, for your particular branch of philosophy, you’ll learn it. If not, why bother?