Even we were not immune to the cliche that languages are the key to culture! And yet how often is this truism forgotten or taken for granted. Each language represents a distinct worldview, possessed of a unique inner logic that makes it beautiful and renders many of the thoughts expressed in it unreproduceable in another tongue. There's no perfect, one-to-one "match" between words from different languages, even if they do refer to the same thing: if there were, we would all be speaking the same tongue. Needless to say, such a world would be a pretty boring place. Bearing that in mind, one quickly realizes that a knowledge of language(s) (including one's own) is the same as a respect for culture(s).

Since knowledge of languages is the key to understanding culture(s), we like to think of ourselves as one of the true multicultural and interdisciplinary entities on campus. A wide range of disciplines and languages – ancient and modern and from various parts of the world – are based in our department: Arabic, Chinese, German, Greek (Modern as well as Ancient), Hebrew, Japanese, Latin, Russian, and Swahili at various levels of proficiency are all taught in our department.

Comparative Literature and Languages
Goals and Learning Objectives

Read about the goals and learning objectives for students in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages... | more |