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).