Languages for a statesman, in 1748

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Herodotean
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby Herodotean » Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:21 pm

einzelne wrote:
Lemus wrote:A fascinating excerpt but one has to wonder how many British statement of that era, or any later one, were actually capable of speaking all six.


I wonder how many freshly minted PhDs in Classics can boast such knowledge today...


Speaking? Not many, though I do have graduate student friends who come pretty close. Gladstone himself certainly wasn't speaking Latin or Greek, though well-educated Englishmen of the time could write prose and verse in both of them. But you can't do research in Classics without six languages (Latin + Greek, English, German, French, Italian, in roughly that order of importance; Byzantinists need modern Greek, and Spanish is becoming more important), and North American PhD programs generally test Classics PhD students in Latin, Greek, German, and French or Italian before allowing them to advance to candidacy. Classics is one of the more demanding humanities fields in terms of languages. It's the Americanist historians, as we've seen on the forum recently, who might think that foreign languages are a waste of time (I speak as an American but not an Americanist).
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby RyanSmallwood » Sat Jan 08, 2022 10:21 pm

While we’re mentioning heavy readers of books in different languages. Might be worth bringing up Steve Donoghue, who has a YouTube channel, and due to extremely unique circumstances, might be able to have read more than any human in history has or probably will barring some crazy technology advancements.

He had a Jesuit education and started reading Latin and Greek, and traveled the world when he was younger and picked up some languages from that, I don’t think he’s ever listed them all, but it seems to include Irish and a number of Germanic and Romance languages. He’s learned to read very fast (but doesn’t “speed read” in the sense of skipping over words), and so he can get through multiple books a day, including very long ones, is a book reviewer so his job is literally to read all day. And if that wasn’t enough, his final edge over everyone else is he seemingly needs barely any sleep and can be productive during the night. I dunno if he has a count of the books he’s read, but I think he gets through many hundreds a year (I think maybe close to or over 1,000? But I could be misremembering) and he’s been reading for decades now.

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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby einzelne » Sun Jan 09, 2022 4:02 pm

RyanSmallwood wrote:He had a Jesuit education and started reading Latin and Greek, and traveled the world when he was younger and picked up some languages from that, I don’t think he’s ever listed them all, but it seems to include Irish and a number of Germanic and Romance languages. He’s learned to read very fast (but doesn’t “speed read” in the sense of skipping over words)


Interesting, thought provoking video. I have lots of questions and reservations about this form of living but now I would really like to know what are these magical exercises which teach Jesuits concentration.
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Jan 09, 2022 5:08 pm

einzelne wrote:
RyanSmallwood wrote:He had a Jesuit education and started reading Latin and Greek, and traveled the world when he was younger and picked up some languages from that, I don’t think he’s ever listed them all, but it seems to include Irish and a number of Germanic and Romance languages. He’s learned to read very fast (but doesn’t “speed read” in the sense of skipping over words)


Interesting, thought provoking video. I have lots of questions and reservations about this form of living but now I would really like to know what are these magical exercises which teach Jesuits concentration.
"critical thinking", I have a vague memory that the Jesuits published a number of rhetoric courses, could that be the sort of thing he's referring to?
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby einzelne » Sun Jan 09, 2022 6:45 pm

Herodotean wrote:But you can't do research in Classics without six languages (Latin + Greek, English, German, French, Italian, in roughly that order of importance.


I don't know people from Classics department but I had a chance to talk to one PhD candidate this fall and he told me that's almost impossible to develop the reading skills in 3 modern languages given other requirements and responsibilities. I don't know if I can generalize my experience but I've got an impression that he wasn't an outlier in his department. American university, not the Ivy league but still a very prestigious one. It makes me wonder what's the actual state of Classics department now.
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby einzelne » Sun Jan 09, 2022 6:55 pm

DaveAgain wrote:critical thinking", I have a vague memory that the Jesuits published a number of rhetoric courses, could that be the sort of thing he's referring to?


But what exactly it entails? University courses have critical thinking classes, I doubt we're talking about the same thing in both cases.
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby Herodotean » Sun Jan 09, 2022 8:01 pm

einzelne wrote:
Herodotean wrote:But you can't do research in Classics without six languages (Latin + Greek, English, German, French, Italian, in roughly that order of importance.


I don't know people from Classics department but I had a chance to talk to one PhD candidate this fall and he told me that's almost impossible to develop the reading skills in 3 modern languages given other requirements and responsibilities. I don't know if I can generalize my experience but I've got an impression that he wasn't an outlier in his department. American university, not the Ivy league but still a very prestigious one. It makes me wonder what's the actual state of Classics department now.


Sure, it's impossible or nearly impossible if you don't come in with a modern foreign language or two already under control. In the North American Classics PhD programs I'm familiar with, only two (German and your choice of French or Italian) are tested. I entered my PhD program able to read French and Italian comfortably and German laboriously. I found the translation exams quite easy, but some of my classmates had to take them multiple times (there was no penalty for failing modern language exams, but you couldn't graduate without passing both). I know people whose languages are better than mine and people whose languages are worse than mine. My program's faculty, at least, made it very clear to us that reading German -- really reading, not just passing a translation exam -- was absolutely necessary for doing research in Classics. (If you know Latin well, of course, it's easier to get by with French and Italian.) It is true, though, that not all Classicists are as comfortable in modern languages as they should be; every now and then you'll see a reviewer complain that the book under review doesn't show familiarity with important German/French/Italian works.
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Re: Languages for a statesman, in 1748

Postby einzelne » Sun Jan 09, 2022 8:17 pm

Herodotean wrote:every now and then you'll see a reviewer complain that the book under review doesn't show familiarity with important German/French/Italian works.


Yes, I still remember vividly Eco's warning in his book How to Write a Thesis: "It is unthinkable to write a thesis in Greek philology without knowing German, the language in which there is a flood of important studies on the subject". That's why I was a little bit baffled to hear that a PhD candidate didn't read it. But again, I'm not in the field, so I don't want to extrapolate my one and only informal chat with a person from a Classics department.
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