Joseph Scaliger 1540-1609.

Georgy Kantor observes, and protests, the elimination of Classical and other Ancient Language Studies at many modern universities, and he is right.

Joseph Justus Scaliger. If you’re not a classicist or a historical linguist, you likely don’t know him. But if you are, he is a giant on whose shoulders you stand. Born in France, in 1540, he made his name at the Dutch university of Leiden. Here, at the lofty peak of the Renaissance, he reimagined what language could do. A polyglot — proficient in French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic — only someone like Scaliger could have achieved something like De emendatione temporum (“On correcting dates”). Freeing the ancient world from slavish Biblical interpretations, he utterly transformed Europe’s sense of deep history. With him, the continent first began to realise that the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia predated Greece and Israel by millennia. It would take centuries to properly decipher their scripts and languages, but that was the beginning of a revolution in historical understanding as profound as the Darwinian revolution in biology.

Scaliger showed that linguistic and textual scholarship is about far more than mere verbs or adjectives: it is a key to unlock our world. Now, though, his legacy is in danger of being abandoned. Over recent months, academics everywhere have been shocked by the news of cuts to long-established language programmes, including at Leiden. Among other languages, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew may all stop being offered. Arabic could soon vanish too: especially shocking at Leiden, home to the oldest chair of the language on earth. Yet if the decline has many causes, monoglot academic environments and budget cuts among them, the consequences are far from mundane. For if the trend continues, we will lose some of the best tools for cultural and historical understanding we have.

RTWT

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“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

​ —Scott-King’s Modern Europe.