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It seems to me that John Womack has taken his view of the benefits of 
knowing foreign languages too far in his latest assertion that historians 
of thought who can read only English "may not properly understand even the 
English they are reading."   Was it because J.M. Keynes could not 
understand French or German that he so badly misunderstood what he read 
from Alfred Marshall, J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, or Adam Smith regarding the 
theory of interest, for example? And was it a handicap of a second language 
that caused Boehm-Bawerk to have mangled the meaning of "capital" in the 
classical theory of interest, a tradition carried on by his followers such 
as F.A. Hayek? 
 
I submit that knowing more languages than one's own may be helpful in 
reading work in other languages.  But such facility is quite separate from 
the care needed to understand work in any language one is reading. For a 
functioning modern economist -- historian of thought or not, I think the 
replacement of the second language requirement in the graduate program in 
North America with mathematics has been a good thing. 
 
James Ahiakpor 
 
 
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