Rollontheground

I don't know if this is entirely true, but a friend of mine who is getting her Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible told me that she *had* to learn Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, French, and German; another friend in Hebrew Bible told me something similar. I wonder if the Biblical lit. people are even more language savvy than the classicists?

I don't think languages should be required, but people would ideally feel compelled to learn them to do work in their field. And I'd argue that even the analyticians could learn something from seeing how other languages "think." (As a side note, check out Kierkegaard's reflections on the Aorist mood in Greek in his unpublished novella Johannes Climasicus, if you ever come across it in a used bookstore or anything.) For example, I think Greek is necessary to pick up on certain un-translatable things in ancient philosophy. E.g., in the Apology, Socrates is charged with "not believing the gods in whom the city believes." But that translation kind of sucks. The word for belief here, NOMIZO, is related to the word for law, NOMOS. Literally, something like "not lawing the gods who the city laws" — which perhaps has a connotation of Esteeming, or pushing it, OBEYING. And Even the translational gods make poor choices. It's important to know this stuff. Should it be required? I don't think so. But hopefully we'd all learn two or three (assuming we don't work solely on English speaking philosophers).

Jesus, guys. I was at my one of my letter writer's houses on New Years Eve as he edited my paper. I got everything in at the last second. I'm not worried about when the application is "complete" — no matter how last-minute we were with getting these things in, I suspect it'll be seen as their lateness. Take this with a grain of salt, though; I'm certainly not your model applicant!