Stepping out to see inside

One phrase that comes up early in the book The Search for God at Harvard by Ari Goldman is a religion professor’s credo, “If you know only one religion, you know none at all.” I don’t recall whether my understanding of this phrase is based on the book’s explanation or my own thinking about it, but here is my take.

There is a framework to what religion is, what areas of life it touches and what its goals are. There is also a framework that describes each individual religion. These frameworks all overlap, but to think I understand religion in general because I understand my own religion, that’s just wrong-headed.

The best example I can think of for this is a Jewish friend who enjoyed discussing religion with a Christian coworker. One day she asked him a question that had been bothering her for some time. “How do Jews get saved?” The dominant purpose of her Christianity was to achieve salvation, and so salvation was to her a central religious value. Judaism is a religion, so how do Jews get saved?

Okay, my understanding of the original religion-professor comment is shaky at best, but if you changed the word “religion” to “language,” I would be in complete agreement.

As a freshman in college, I was looking over majors and had the unusual experience of feeling deeply annoyed by the linguistics major. The reason for my annoyance was because the linguistics major required a certain level of Latin and of Greek, as well as two semesters of a Romance language of your choice. There were no other language requirements beyond that.

How shortsighted, I thought.

At that point I had been studying Japanese for a year, and a major attractor for me was the desire to study a language that was as dissimilar to English as possible. I had taken French throughout high school and thought, flippantly, that it was basically highfalutin English with a funny accent.

By learning Japanese, I felt that I had additional insight into what a language could be. The subject of a sentence can be implied! You can conjugate by person-number-gender, or you can conjugate by politeness levels! Does it even matter what order you use for the different parts of the sentence? Maybe not!

This little-vision linguistics major, I decided, had it all wrong. By the end of the major you might be able to say what Romance languages are, and you would know how Romance languages develop. But you wouldn’t understand the truth about language.  You have to travel way outside of what you know, before you can make sense of your world.

I checked my college website to see if the linguistics major still calls for the same courses. The major is gone, though one can still concentrate in “language and linguistics.” Looking at the concentration’scourse requirements, I am mollified.