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And yet, modern academics are expected to have fluency in English even if it's a second language - academia has always required a lingua franca for obvious reas
by danjac 5y ago
And yet, modern academics are expected to have fluency in English even if it's a second language - academia has always required a lingua franca for obvious reasons, and English simply replaced Latin for that purpose (I think at one point in the early-to-mid 20th century a knowledge of German was required in US universities for some science and engineering subjects).
So most academics are required so spend a non-trivial amount of time learning a foreign language to very high proficiency, to the point of being able to read, write and deliver specialist papers in it.
- xhevahir 5y agoThey're not using these languages as linguae francae, though. They're treating fluency in Latin and Greek as a mark of a scholar's preparation in the field of classics. (Less charitably, you might say they're using it simply as a shibboleth.) Seems kind of pointless to me, since AFAIK it's a matter of convention and institutional inertia that so many disciplines are grouped together under that label. I mean, if I'm a researcher in the bioarchaeology of Cretan olive cultivation, what have I got in common with a student of Attic tragedy, other than the fact that we both took Greek at some point and belong to the same university department?