UNTAUGHT LANGUAGES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I was amused and dismayed to find in the April 7 CRIMSON that six appointments in the Linguistics (and related) Department "extend the University's linguistic coverage" to the point where "the only major area still without a Faculty expert will be African linguistics . . ." Such self-congratulation, whatever its source, is premature as the following figures will suggest.

Major South East and South Asia Languages not taught at Harvard (in millions): Assamese/India (7), Bengali/India and Pakistan (86), Burmese (16), Cebuano/Phillippines (7), Gujarati/India (22), Hindi/India (165), Javanese/Indonesia (42), Kannada/India (20), Malay (72), Malayalam/India (17), Marathi/India (34), Nepali/Nepal, India (9), Oriya/India (9), Punjabi/India, Pakistan (26), Pushtu/Afghanistan (12), Rajasthani/India (17), Siamese (21), Sinhalese/Ceylon (8), Sudanese/Indonesia (13), Tagalog/Philippines (12), Tamil/India, Ceylon (37), Telegu/India (41), Urdu/Pakistan, India (55), and Vietnamese (26), Total 774,000,000.

The languages for which appointments have been made are not spoken nor do they possess contemporary literatures. In the present era, when development problems of new nations loom large, there may be some question whether scholarship is best served by appointments in ancient languages only. Lloyd I. Rudolph   Assistant Professor of Government