![]() ![]() But that’s the way it is, as inevitable as internationalism. It’s a thoroughly deplorable state of affairs. Many if not most US American classicists, to their shame and to their and the world's loss (if they did but know it), speak no other language. At international meetings even Germans and Italians (and even some French, wonder of wonders) are as likely as not to give their presentations in English, and other-national journals with articles in their native language are fading fast. ![]() Chinese scholarship on what we will have to stop calling the Classics, now burgeoning, is mostly in English I suppose that may change in the future, so maybe that's a language to learn (for other reasons too!) but I can testify it's not easy for someone with acquaintance only with I-E languages! The big four Western languages increasingly dominate journals and international conferences increasingly require papers to be in one of those four and English increasingly dominates over all the rest. Russian scholarship is increasingly in English, at least as far as Greek literature goes and even linguistics. I hope I don't sound too harsh, I just want to temper some of the unabated enthusiasm fledgling Classicists hear from day one about research languages.Īfter German and Italian, most definitely French, with everything else (Spanish, modern Greek) far far behind. I will say though that learning these other languages often comes at a reasonably low cost: If you have Latin it really is intuitive to pick up the Romance languages, I can't claim that Italian cost me any real effort per esempio. The more you read, the more obvious your needs will become so don't worry about it. As time goes on the amount of new stuff that you MUST read lessens immensely. The highly influential older works will already have spread their influence across several languages. Yes I think you do have to learn modern languages - I think at least French, German and Italian - but it's not going to be as transformative as you might think. I've known one or two people who picked it up as a research language. I don't know too much about Russian - I'm rightly suspicious of their scholarship - but they produce a lot of work on Scythians, the Black sea, Iranian-Greek interactions and so on and forth. Greek scholarship often gets castigated (tbf, often rightly so) but you'd be hard pressed doing archaeology without it and, yes, there is a decent amount of byzantine stuff. The amount of good work in Italian is increasing, especially the kind of traditional scholarship coming out of Pisa on textual criticism, philology and manuscripts etc. There's a lot of stuff on ancient religions, mythology, structuralism etc in French that can be rescued from the inanities of literary theory for example. There's this mindset in Classics - well largely in the UK - that one needs to be 's not always helpful. I had to learn French, German and Italian even as an undergraduate and often the main reason I'd use the former two languages were a) consulting some great reference work or b) arguing with a recent book or journal. ![]() Honestly.the gap between English and the other languages is considerably larger than most are aware of or willing to admit. Does anyone have anything to say for it? I can recall chancing on some interesting (and illegible) stuff every once in a while, and made the mental note that it wouldn't be terribly useless to learn it (my German is decent enough, certainly enough to read scholarship, so it wouldn't be completely out of the blue), but there's the circular argument that no one else around here uses it, so we don't have bibliography, so I don't know what exists, and so don't even know where I should look etc. I started to write this thinking of Dutch in particular. And then what? Where on the ladder, if at all, would you put French and Modern Greek, Russian and Dutch, etc? Would you say there other languages more tied to specific fields of study? (From the list above, only thing that comes to mind would be Modern Greek for Byzantine studies.) There's the usual culprits, German, especially for Greek studies, Italian, especially for Roman & Latin etc. What modern languages should be a priority if you're doing Classics? This started as a comment on jeidsath's post in the word accent thread. ![]()
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