nooj wrote:Is it because people who learn Latin are likely to also add Greek, rather than lots of modern languages?
In my faculty it was the norm to know or learn (they didn't care how as long as you did it) German, Italian and French, at least. In academia, to be a classicist, it is taken for granted that you are a 'polyglot' able to read at least major languages used for publication, otherwise you would be sadly left out.
Yes, I put that badly. To be an academic classicist you certainly need those. But they are usually reading languages, which is quite different from the general world of polyglottery, which (seems to me to be?) more speaking-focused - despite many exceptions on this board and elsewhere.
Again, of course, there's probably an anglophone-European (and other?) distinction - British or American Classicists can read, but European Classicists tend to be fairly fluent in other European languages?
In my own exceptionally brief academic 'career' I once made the mistake of commenting that I couldn't use a historical source because it was in French. The response was 'why does that matter? It's just
French! Anyone can read it!'
Perhaps more relevant than my badly-thought-out post above is that academic classicists and language learners just come from a very different language-learning culture to the online polyglot? There are plenty who have done both, of course, including many of the best... but aren't a lot of us here precisely because we didn't have opportunity to, success in, or satisfaction in, learning languages that way?