Historians of the Middle East traditionally trained in four to five dead languages

Evidence

At one stage I was engaged simultaneously in the study of Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew and Classical Arabic—a rather heavy program of dead languages for a mere undergraduate. As a graduate student, I expanded my study of Arabic, and added Persian and Turkish. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 67

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: This old-style multi-language training is largely gone in modern grad programs—worth chasing what replaced it and what was lost.

Related

• Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects (similarity 0.85)
• Classical Arabic alone is nearly useless for everyday conversation in the Arab world. (similarity 0.82)
• Christian Europe’s multilingual plurality structurally required language learning (similarity 0.79)
• Persian, not Arabic, was the classical literary language of late-medieval Islam (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval European scholars studied at Arab Muslim universities in Spain and Sicily. (similarity 0.78)