Hi, everyone. I read an older thread on AskHistorians discussing the decline of Classics as a discipline, and the corresponding reduction in the number of people who can read ancient Greek or Latin at the level of proficiency that Classics professors could 50 years ago.
I realize that the answer will vary based upon specialty, but on average, how fluent are current historians who specialize in periods/subjects/regions that would have overlapped with "Classics" a couple decades ago?
And to what extent do historians rely upon translations of Greek or Latin texts these days, as opposed to reading them in the original languages?
Thanks!
I can't give you a quantitative answer, because I don't have that data on hand. But apart from being a very-close-to-finishing doctoral candidate whose dissertation requires a great deal of Latin and Greek, a classics graduate, and someone with a fair amount of interest in contemporary issues in second language acquisition in relation to classical languages, here's my informed view of the topic.
Those trained in 'Classics' proper. Most PhD programs for classics have a fairly long and extensive reading requirement for their comp exams (in the US, anyway). Despite the general decline in classics, and the unfortunate shift to a grammar-translation method thanks to the rise of German Philology from the 18th century onwards, classics doctorates are forced to read a vast quantity of material in their target languages. This tends to mean that they are, indeed, quite fluent at reading in Latin/Greek.
Few are fluent in speaking, but that's another issue for another day. There are people relatively fluent in speaking, and there are corners of the classics & related disciplines world articulating that this is a better way to teach/acquire language proficiency.
While overall there may be a decline, particularly since some of our current crop of classicists did not have the benefit/horror of growing up in school systems which privileged Latin/Greek from an early age, the end point for those who get to the professional academic level is pretty similar - a fairly decent ability to read fluently.
Personally, I can tell you that I have 10+ years in Greek and Latin, and I can read things in my primary field (early christian texts) pretty well. I can read things outside my field (classical texts, esp. prose) fairly well. I can't read poetry fluently, but I can work my way through a poetic text with the necessary tools. I can read non-high-literary texts (e.g. biblical texts) generally without any aids at all and as fluently, though maybe not quite as quickly, as my native language.
Historians in these fields do use translations, but they don't rely on translations. It's often incredibly faster to have access to an (English, or other) translation of a text you're working with, to reap the benefit of someone else's translation work, and accelerate your own reading of it. At the same time, any time you're doing serious work on an ancient text, you're referring back to the original language text and working from that.