----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]