alderson@Jessica.stanford.edu (Rich Alderson) (03/22/89)
I think that everyone who is arguing this particular thread has missed the point of foreign language requirements in graduate degree programs. It is not that the student will "understand some other culture better." It is not that someone has decided that the student has nothing better to do with the time than try to cram yet another unrelated bit of knowledge into an already crowded brain. The long years of study of a foreign language as an object of study do NOT provide any greater understanding of the culture for which it is the means of communication. That is provided by reading, IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE, the great works of literature in that language. (It is even further enhanced by reading the trashy novels in that language, but that's a different topic.) The point of a foreign language requirement in graduate degree programs is that there ARE papers written in other languages than one's own. Translations may be well and good for the day to day worker who is willing to accept what someone else may say is the intent of the article. However, for the researcher --and that, after all, is what is SUPPOSED (vide infra) to be coming out of graduate degree programs--someone else's word is really NOT good enough. It has been claimed that those in other countries are writing in English. In some fields, that is likely to be true. However, that does not mean that ALL interesting research is in English. To take an example from my own background, the primary language for publications on the historical and comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is German. This is so much the case that people with whom I studied WROTE in German, although I was studying at an American university. In another field: Much has been made, over the last hundred years, of Freud's concepts of "ego," "superego," and "id," nice Latin terms which English-speak- ing translators thought would be more acceptable to their readers that direct translations of Freud's rather folksy "das Ich," "das Uberich," and "das Es." What's wrong with "the I," the "over-I," and "the It"? They don't sound "scientific." But a researcher who doesn't read German can't pick up on the difference in connotation between the originals and the usual English/Latin translations. This has gone on long enough in comp.arch. I am directing follow-ups to soc.misc. A warning about that: I don't read that group, and won't start. Any flames will be directed to /dev/null. I DO read comp.edu... The note you were directed to above: Back in the good old days--an ominous beginning--it was considered sufficient to have a Bachelor's degree in your field in order to teach at the college or even university level. It was expected that teachers would go on to get advanced degrees, but that teaching was their primary job, and it could be years before they got as far as a doctorate. Such researchers were rewarded with MODEST increases in status and remuneration. Today, many with Bachelor's degrees are hardly better educated than high school graduates of the time to which I hark back; graduate students are getting the education that was theirs by right when they decided to go to college. Enough. These are of course my opinions, as most people these days don't want them, and think it shameful that I hold them. Rich Alderson