May 15, 2025  | By Jacob Sharpe (A27)

The St. John’s Program has always proudly and lovingly embraced its Hellenistic roots—vernacularisms such as “archon” for club leaders and “polity” for the student body being just two examples—but only half of a Johnnie’s lingual education is dedicated to the study of ancient Greek. The college’s second language, French, is comparatively less represented throughout campus culture. 

French thinkers, however, comprise much of the Program and are the driving force behind seminal advances in theology, science, and more. And starting their junior year, Johnnies dive into the language behind great minds such as Blaise Pascal and René Descartes as they transition from learning ancient Greek to mastering contemporary French, all while exploring its impact on modern thought and language.

Johnnies’ exposure to French thought begins in freshman lab, where Pascal builds on Archimedes’ discoveries in hydrostatics, or the study of liquids under equilibrium. Interestingly enough, Pascal is a multi-hyphenate Program author who periodically reappears across the undergraduate program. Students read his philosophy and theology in Pensées, his mathematical musings in his “Essay on Conics,” and his treatise on fluid mechanics in his Account of the Great Experiment Concerning the Equilibrium of Liquids. The “Great Experiment” in question contributed much to modern science, leading to the invention of the hydraulic press via Pascal’s discovery of liquids’ incompressibility.

The freshman lab experience uses a French lens to learn about atomic theory as well through the work of French chemists Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. Here, students see French minds’ lasting impact on modern science through surprising means: the Greek language. Lavoisier’s method, as outlined in his Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, invented new names for chemicals, which he constructed from borrowed ancient Greek words. “Oxygen” is one of them, constructed after the Greek words for “acid” and “generation,” based on Lavoisier’s misconception that oxygen was a constituent of all acids.

During sophomore year, authors like René Descartes and François Viète further exemplify the role of French thinkers in the scientific revolution through their groundbreaking contributions to modern algebra. In such a manner, Johnnies spend much of their first two years studying French academics and their contributions to the modern world. By junior year, they are finally ready to tackle the French language itself. These fledgling Francophones start small, translating excerpts from texts such as Pascal’s Pensées before throwing themselves into more imposing works. Sophomores taking Greek have the entirety of Sophocles’ Antigone or Plato’s Meno to wrestle with for class translation assignments, while juniors have the crux of their efforts in translating Phèdre, Jean Racine’s adaptation of the Euripidean tragedy Hippolytus.

While French is at first glance more intuitive and recognizable than Greek, learning it presents challenges of its own. Santa Fe tutor Amie Zimmer observes that ancient Greek, through its novel alphabet and unusual grammar, often creates an “assumption of strangeness” in the students that study it, which leads them to practice great care when they translate. However, the comfort of a Latin script and intuitive grammar for English speakers may lull those same students into a false sense of security when they work with French, leading to mistakes with so-called “false friends,” or words that resemble English words without any similar meaning. Thus, French proves to be a formidable foe in its own right.

Part of studying a language faithfully is adapting one’s methods to suit its quiddities. One unfortunate necessity in the approach to learning ancient Greek, for instance, is deemphasizing pronunciation. Uncertainty about how ancient Greek was originally pronounced forces Johnnies to simply do their best, leading them to focus on grammar and syntax in their freshman and sophomore years. French demands a more vocal approach, forcing students into the world of modern spoken language and the way prose and poetry sound when read out loud. They must broaden their scope beyond word or translation choice and hear poetry, drama, and prose the way it would sound when performed, as they do while encountering English lyric poetry and Shakespeare’s plays while studying literature as sophomores. Learning French through the works of Racine and Molière allows students to learn through a method perhaps less obvious than before: by the intuitive aesthetic of a language. An ongoing joke with a good bit of truth to it in Zimmer’s class conflates consonance with correctness: “If it sounds wrong, cacophonous, or dissonant,” she quips, “it’s probably wrong in the language.”

Annapolis tutor Sarah Benson agrees with the understated role of aesthetics in grasping spoken French, and she sees this visualized in the changing methods of learning French compared to that of ancient Greek. Guided by the Alfred Mollin and Robert Williamson textbook An Introduction to Ancient Greek, freshmen and sophomores take a rather scientific and analytical approach to language, visualizing its construction through cases, aspects, and voices. Translation often becomes a mission of recognizing the framework of a construction—such as a “μέν…δέ” particle pair—and putting the parts together to form a coherent whole.

French, on the other hand, is more readable and intuitive than ancient Greek for English speakers, which leads to a reading-focused approach. One popular textbook used by tutors and students, Joseph Palmeri and E.E. Milligan’s French for Reading Knowledge, teaches students to recognize cognates and perhaps someday read academic articles and literary pieces with only the aid of a dictionary. Such an approach to learning a language does not treat it as a mystery or challenge but as an intricate construction that desires to be instinctively known, the knowledge of which is available to all with the motivation to master it.

Regardless of the different approaches taken to studying French versus ancient Greek at St. John’s College, the underlying philosophy remains the same: the study of language, Zimmer says, whether in Greek, French, or even English, is an opportunity to “meaningfully think about the way that language constitutes our world, or vice versa, the way that our world constitutes language.”