On Language Requirements
One of the things that many of us mediævalists have in common is that we're snobbish about languages. Ok, so we can't be quite as snobby as the Classicists, because, well, Greek. And some of the Late Antiquity types do Persian or some other Near Eastern language. Since I kind of hang out with those folks, though, I think I'll lump them in for the purposes of this little blog post. So for the sake of argument, let's just say that those of us whose fields of study span the era before about 1500 tend to be language snobs.
This was true in my grad program. I remember group pity extended towards the person whose Latin and French were good enough to pass the requirements, but just not good enough that s/he could work in anything other than English History, and only where OE and ME were not required. A 'lesser' degree seemed in order. Some of you may have noticed that this is gate-keeping again. Yeah, it is. Ancarett made a comment to yesterday's post that made me want to write this. That, and I'm panicking about my travels, due to start next week.
For us mediæval and earlier types, language is the test at the gate. After climbing that nasty mountainous road to a graduate program, you will meet the
bridge gatekeeper, and he will say something along the lines of...
Gatekeeper: "Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see"
The intrepid grad student will answer: "Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid."
G:"What... is your name? "
IGS: "IGS"
G: "How is your Latin?"
IGS: "I will pass the exams, I promise"
G: "do you know or can you acquire a reading knowledge of French, German, and anything else demanded in the next year?"
IGS:"Yes."
G: "Right, yer in."
But then that year is up, and the conversation goes like this:
Gatekeeper: "Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see"
The intrepid grad student will answer: "Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid."
Gatekeeper: "Did you pass your Latin exam?"
IGS: "Yes"
G:"Lisez-vous français?"
IGS: "Oui?"
G: "Sprechen Sie, Bzw. Lesen Sie Deutsch? Wenn Sie etwas auf Deutsch lesen, wissen Sie unbedingt, dass Ihre Übersetzung korrekt ist?"
IGS: "er ... ja ...peut-etre?"
At this point, the student is not doomed to be cast into the chasm.* There are lots of languages we use. Perhaps the questions should have been posed in Italian or Old Norse (in which case, the student will really need that German, too). My point is that we are expected to have Latin and at least two modern European languages between when we walk in the door (say, for example, at Toronto) and when we get to the writing stage. Presumably our colleagues in the UK and Ireland have the languages when they start, because they don't have coursework. At my grad school, Europeanists needed to pass two language exams, Americanists one (and they could substitute SPSS if it was more relevant). Medievalists needed three plus any other languages needed -- and we didn't get a choice in the first one. Latin.
But languages we must have. They are not always easy to learn. We must also learn other odd and peculiar skills, like paleography, the reading of archæological reports, Orts- or Personennamenkunde, and a working knowledge of a huge number of general primary sources. That may be another difference, come to think of it. I think that the canonical writings in our fields tend to include far more primary sources than secondary sources. But that's another post. Now, we may not have to read all of these languages or acquire all these skills equally well. New Kid, for example, can probably kick my butt at reading unedited legal documents, because almost everything I use has been edited. It's in Latin, and much of it isn't translated, but it's edited. I don't need to read some scribe's handwriting -- although with Carolingian miniscule, at least that's not the most difficult thing in the world! On the other hand, she'll never have to try to trace family relationships through the leading names and name elements! The medievalist's tools are diverse and hard to acquire. I can tell from some of the comments I've seen here and elsewhere that some people think we are using those tools to keep people out. To a certain extent, I guess that's true. But would you hire a carpenter who couldn't use a hammer and saw?
Without the tools of our trade, languages being the most important and basic of those tools, a mediævalist (or Classicist, or Late Antiquarian)** cannot join in the scholarly conversation. I've just glanced over to my collection of library books. For the first time I can remember, the majority of books are in English. That's because I just took back six books in German and because I'm working on a project on women and property, and there is a lot of scholarship in English to weed through, even though it may have very little to do with what was happening in the Lahngau and Grabfeld and Mainzgau in the 9th and 10th centuries. There's one book in French,
Sauver son Âme et se Perpétuer. I'm not really looking forward to it because, well, it's in French, which is my fourth-best language. But I need to look at it, because it's part of the conversation. If I ignore what's out there, then my own work will be incomplete and honestly, pretty shoddy -- or at least it won't be able to stand up to close scrutiny.
I'm lucky, in that I have a really good feel for languages. I have to work at them, but I can generally pick up the basics pretty quickly. I also lucked out because my grandfather made me read and speak Spanish as a child (not that I'm all that fluent 40 years later), my counselors made me take two years of French in middle school, and I foundered through two years of high school Latin before I picked it up again my last two years of undergrad, where I took three years of Latin courses and a quarter of Greek in two years. Somewhere in there I took a year of German. Among my friends and colleagues, it's pretty much only the Classics undergrads who have comparable language exposure. Meaningful language requirements at any level seem to have fallen by the wayside in most Anglo-American educational systems (except for the politically-motivated French requirements in parts of Canada). I do know from friends in the UK and Ireland that they often deal with the same issues of under-trained students who wish to pursue postgrad degrees.
I think one of the results of this will be that time to finishing will continue to creep up for people who go into grad programs in Mediæval History -- or those students accepted and/or granted fellowships will be those who already have languages. My guess is that the students who have language skills will be from the high-powered unis or selective Liberal Arts Colleges. I don't like to think what that might mean for demographics. I also don't like to think that our requirements will make others think that we occupy some rarified position -- at least, no more rarified than the people who split atoms or do any number of very specialized things. This doesn't seem to be as much a problem for our Asianist and Islamist colleagues, because, well, what they do is
relevant. Somehow, and I realize that none of these thoughts are as well-formed as I'd like, but it was either blog now, or blog much, much later and blog something closer to perfection, I think that that is the problem. When we don't see language as being particularly relevant to our daily lives, we don't see that the fields that require languages are relevant unless they directly connect to politics or economic forces.
Whatever the results, I think that we need to conceive of language requirements (or paleography requirements, etc.) differently. We are used to the gate-keeping/maintaining standards model. What if, instead, we were to see these -- and describe these to others -- not as requirements absent the connection to our work that we know is implicit and absolute, but rather as tools and skills. We cannot do our jobs properly until and unless we acquire them, in the same way that cabinetmaker needs to know the different properties of different types of wood and the kinds of tools (and how to used the tools) to use in their appropriate circumstances.
In terms of those of us who have got through the training and are either on the market or employed, I think there is another battle -- and perhaps another post. I don't know about the rest of you, but my teaching load is detrimental to my getting a lot of scholarly work done during the academic year. This means that I have to come up with strategies (not too many good ones, as it happens) for keeping up my languages. It takes me up to a week of hard work to get to where I feel comfortable in my reading skills again. Mostly, I find myself grabbing dictionaries and actually writing out translations that differ from what I read only in completeness. But the tools seem to rust. Next post -- dealing with rusty tools.
*Apologies to Monty Python
** And yes, I know that we have colleagues in Asian and Islamic (and Eastern European) history who have to learn many of the same types of things to do their work. Although they are in some ways as marginalized as we are, I think that time plays a role here, too. If you are a modern historian, I think that people understand more easily because of the relevance issue I mentioned above.
