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Arguelles’ Six Most Important Languages | ||
Tags: Hit List | Alexander Arguelles | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5644 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 17 of 44 25 January 2011 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||
That would be Japanese and Korean for me. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5127 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 18 of 44 25 January 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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[QUOTE=Chung] Newton as far as I could figure was fluent in Early Modern English and very likely had a strong command of Latin (he did write his findings in Latin). He probably also knew some Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew since he was supposedly a biblical scholar.
By Einstein's day things had changed, and Einstein's apparent lack of fluency in anything other than English and German didn't bar him from acheiving scientific greatness, seeing that public education created a growing pool of people with the right amount of knowledge to begin understanding his theories, not to mention being literate in standard English or standard German. Now, it's changed a bit more, and it's quite common for educated people in the English-speaking world to get by on just English (with translations into English as required). Noam Chomsky is an example of this since with the exception of not being a polyglot in the mold of those scholars of yore who were fluent in several dead languages, he's still considered a scholar (in addition to being a rabble-rouser, but I digress...) QUOTE] Certainly we should be sensitive to the risk of snobbery, but there's also a problem when we lower our standards and pretend that certain things don't matter when they actually do. What particularly bothers me is the last part of your statement, that times have changed and that English-speakers can get by using only their own language and consulting translations where necessary. Of course people can "get by" using only English, but this isn't something to be celebrated. To a large extent in the Anglophone world, there is a widespread delusion that languages don't really matter and that translations are an acceptable means of engaging with foreign cultures. This has produced a certain parochialism and bizarre cultural isolation in our countries which is regrettable. We're not the only ones of course, but at the moment, given the role of English in the world today, we're the worst offenders. In my own field, ancient philosophy, this has led to a situation where there are huge numbers of "scholars" of Greek philosophy who can't read the original texts, let alone any of the ancillary languages (Latin, German, French, and Italian), leading to an extremely high crap to gold ratio in English language publications (there are of course many excellent scholars as well). The same goes for a large number of fields in which languages should be absolutely central (history, cultural studies, literature, etc.) From what I understand, Chomsky has been roundly criticized from many quarters for his lack of knowledge of foreign languages, since he is, of all things, a linguist. It's true that for Newton and Einstein (and the Latin and Greek figures cited in an earlier post) it wasn't necessary to learn many foreign languages, but that doesn't mean their ignorance of these things is laudable. The Greeks, for instance, had many wonderful qualities, but their contempt for other cultures and languages was certainly not one of them. At issue is what you need for a well-rounded education and to the extent that great scientists lack a knowledge of foreign languages or literature or what have you, their all-round education is lacking. (Steven Jay Gould is an excellent example of a scientist with a strong grounding in the humanities, including a knowledge of five or six languages.) It works in the other direction too: you can be a great philologist or historian and lack knowledge of mathematics and science, but if you do it doesn't show that maths aren't important for educated people, it shows a defect in your education. As to the question of how many languages you should know. I think Arguelles goes a bit far, but it seems to me that for someone who wishes to have a well-rounded education with a concentration in the humanities six languages is fair as a goal. For someone with a general education or for people with a leaning more to the natural sciences, I think one is enough to plug the gaping hole that comes from not having any knowledge of foreign languages, but more is desirable and certainly doable. Edited by cmj on 25 January 2011 at 1:37pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6945 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 44 25 January 2011 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's not necessarily something to be celebrated when we see intellectual circles today increasingly using English when communicating with each other (including when these circles transcend simple ethnic or national boundaries). If anything it's irrelevant, since the fact that there is dialogue or effective exchange of ideas going on that counts. If these intellectuals were brainstorming in Latin, should we feel better about that? What seems to be getting lost is that it's Prof. A.'s opinion that educated people (as he considers them) should learn a set of 5-6 languages which he has concluded to be important. The thing here is that this isn't terribly different from asking any of us which 5, 10, 20 or x languages someone should learn. On one hand, we take other forum members' opinions with a grain of salt, feeling that all of us participating in these polls represent just one person's view/preferences/biases or are just "average joes". On the other, however, Prof. A.'s position is taken more seriously as if he were somehow much more worthy than any of us here. I'm all for education and scholarly pursuits (especially considering that my athletic abilities are a poor second to my intellectual interests), however his notion of which languages an "educated" person or scholar should learn reflect his preferences than anything else. To take the 18th or 19th century as a golden age of academia (as Lucky Charms put it) as is detectable in Prof. A.'s post, seems at odds with what I can see today in scholars today. They study what they have to study or what interests them, not necessarily what someone else thinks an "educated person" should know using some perceived set of norms at a non-random point in history. For example, Prof. Robert Greenberg who is an expert in Southern Slavonic languages is fluent in BCMS/SC, Bulgarian, English, French, Hebrew, Macedonian and Russian, and is proficient in German and Slovenian. His CV also indicates reading knowledge in Czech, Italian, Old Church Slavonic, Polish and Ukrainian. Notice how there's no Ancient Greek, Sanskrit or any of the other "sacred cows" among languages from Antiquity. Would we consider Greenberg a "professional" or a "scholar"? Is Greenberg too parochial by lacking a stated fascination with non-European culture or ability to use ancient Chinese or Classical Arabic? The bottom line is that Prof. A's ideal is his alone, and may not be applicable to all of us, not even academics. Subtly denigrating people who don't align fully with Prof. A.'s world-view can border on the confrontational. 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5127 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 20 of 44 25 January 2011 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know if the last comment was directed at me in particular, but just in case I do want to make it clear that I'm not trying to insult or denigrate anyone, subtly or otherwise : ) In fact, I disagree with most of the rest of Arguelle's post, particularly his criteria for selecting the languages one should know based one's cultural affiliation. Of course, your choice of languages should follow your interests. Mine are in Western Antiquity, but I don't think that everyone's should be. I generally have more admiration and respect for people who branch out to study other cultures and traditions than for those who stay within their own sphere... The only point I wanted to make is that there is a certain parochialism involved in thinking your own language suffices because it is the dominant language of contemporary discourse. It may for practical purposes be sufficient, but it encourages a certain amount of cultural solipsism which I, and I think almost everybody else on the board, find very unattractive. Learning another language isn't a cure-all solution, but it does help. To be fair, I find a similar degree of monoglot chauvinism in France, and I'm certain I would in other countries as well. It's not bad that English is the global scientific language as opposed to something else, but it create a certain cultural smugness which I don't find particularly healthy. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6945 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 44 25 January 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not really, cmj, however the tone of a supporter of an idea can get a bit carried away :-). I'm just wary of thinking that takes its cue from an unabashed admiration at norms linked to the past - Prof. A.'s post has elements of that.
If you want to see me in a rougher fashion, you should have seen my post about Bodmer's "The Loom of Language" where I took issue with his elevation of Mediterranean culture and statement in how Russian collectivism originated in a land whose language evolution was backwards (?!). His tract there reeked of the cultural snobbery and chauvinism of Western European thinking in the 19th century which held the aesthetic standards (a mix of the Greco-Roman with the incipent "superiority" of certain Western European nations) as the standards to measure everything else. *blech* It makes me start doing a slow burn even as I recall it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5134 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 22 of 44 25 January 2011 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
From your description I would regard this person as "scholar"; it seems his knowledge of his subject of interest far exceeds the indispensable and merely useful. Evidently, human pursuits are too varied and too vast to circumscribe to any formula of adequateness or completeness. It would be quite absurd to maintain that ignorance of Greek automatically excludes someone from the ranks of the "educated". The Professor was requisitely clear about this too. It is also trivial that Einstein did not need Sanskrit or Chinese to become fluent in mathematics, the language of physics, and achieve greatness. Still though, beyond a specialist knowledge in a single field, culture, literature, philosophy, the religions, society, history, etc., in a wider sense do remain central to any claim of awareness of the world around us, and in order to apprehend it in at least a modicum of its rich diversity, we must step beyond the narrow confines of our country and time. This can be roughly and preliminarily approximated through translation, but it is far from ideal, and an ideal is what Mr. Argüelles did put forward, not for everyone to follow either, but precisely for those who wish to embark upon such a journey of discovery, for the aspiring "educated" man or woman - not your average college graduate. As an aside, to my personal ideal I would add at least a basic working knowledge of the sciences, economics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, mathematics. Edited by Juаn on 25 January 2011 at 10:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5062 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 23 of 44 26 January 2011 at 12:43am | IP Logged | |||||
I always found it comical how many Western Europeans (especially Germans and British) looked with such condescension upon Orthodox Europe, when the links between the ancient Greeks and Russians (through the Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine Empires, royal intermarriage, Orthodox Christianity, in a continuous fashion) are actually more unbroken than the rather abrupt manner in which Germanic barbarians assembled their Arian kingdoms, switched to Catholicism, completely forgot about Greek culture, and then had it filter back into their cultures via Renaissance Italy (which got the Greek input, again, due the collapse of the Byzantines and flight of Greeks into Italy). The Fallmerayer hypothesis is particularly funny in that regard. I can understand Romance Europe taking pride in its descent from Latin and the Roman Empire. I don't understand how, on the other hand, Germanic snobs got it into their heads that they are the "true" descendants of the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks were as much "Eastern European" as they were "Western European" as they were "Middle Eastern." They defied the modern cultural categories we use and they influenced the cultures that followed them in all directions: Italy, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, Egypt, etc. I also think that the whole satem/centum distinction as a paramount one in Indo-European linguistics has a cultural bias of detaching "westerners" from "easterners," although its relevance becomes a bit questionable when we have the "cross-overs" between the groups, as for example the links between Balto-Slavic and Germanic, or between Greek and Armenian and Indo-Aryan. On the other hand, one need only point to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin (not to mention others), when the Nordicists get bent out of shape about the alleged lingustic/cultural inferiority of Russians or other Slavs. Edited by Merv on 26 January 2011 at 12:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5062 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 24 of 44 26 January 2011 at 12:51am | IP Logged | |||||
Arguelles doesn't do much beyond languages. Why should that be the measure of culture, anymore than understand of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian descriptions of dynamics or biochemistry? If anything, it is science that is less isolated, less culture-specific, less parochial. It is truly universal. Why is a physicist uncultured if he doesn't know any Shakespeare plays but a professor of English is not uncultured if he doesn't know Maxwell's equations and how to apply them? 16 persons have voted this message useful |
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