I'll be honest, rather than polite. This is silly. Aside from a very few
unusual people, lots of us are able to gain real fluency in only one or
two modern languages, or maybe three, depending on where and how one is
brought up. If one starts learning a language, a modern one or one no
longer in common use, as an adult, or even as teenager, it customarily
takes years of hard work to gain enough fluency to read (i.e. interpret
written documents) fluently, and composing or speaking in that language
with fluency will be even more difficult for most people.
Are we then to forbid people from teaching and learning -- and *learning*
-- about the history of mathematics, or the history of anything else,
because they aren't qualified to so linguistically?
By the way, I speak as a person who has translated a fair amount of
mathematical work (and some other kinds of work, too) from several
languages into English, for example in order to write reviews for the
*Mathematical Reviews*. I also fairly recently read a very long book by
Giuseppe Veronese on a non-archimedean linear continuum which was written
in Italian (*Fondamenti di geometria*, 1891), and has never been translated
into English as far as I know, although it was translated into German by
Adolf Schepp (*Grundzuege der Geometrie*, 1894), a book I also read. It
was amusing for me to see occasional differences between the Italian and
German versions, mostly minor, but sometimes quite substantial. I
interpreted and reconciled these differences as best I could for someone
who only reads Italian and German with some modicum of skill, and cannot be
said to be fluent in these two languages. I am, however, or at least was
at the time, quite fluent in mathematical English, which presupposes some
fluency in mathematics itself, which is quite desirable in someone who
wants to translate mathematical works from one language to another, whether
the person is fluent in both of the languages or not. I was asked to
publish a part of this work, and commentary on it, because, the editor
said, I was one of the few people he knew who could even *read* (i.e.
interpret) Veronese's mathematical works in the three languages involved.
This paper appears as p. 107-145 of the book *Real Numbers, Generalizations
of the Reals, and Theories of Continua*, edited by Philip Ehrlich, 1994.
I'm guessing that the proposal that one can only obtain historical
knowledge if one reads relevant documents in their original languages was
made by a young person, who hasn't yet come to recognize certain
limitations we humans have.
-From here, we could go on to a discuss of historiography in general (one
of my favorite topics) or in history of mathematics in particular, as Julio
has requested, and/or to a discussion of the nature and functions of
language. Anyone for the labyrinths?
Gordon Fisher gfisher@shentel.net