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Mezzofanti judged today | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| tmp011007 Diglot Senior Member Congo Joined 6068 days ago 199 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 9 of 19 11 January 2012 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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somehow I'd like to think he was that good but there's no way to test that.. on a side note, life and mental processes were quite different -no television, no internet memes, no bling-bling :P (ok ok, just alcohol and lots of wars)- so IMO it's quite likeable he was that good (maybe with an awful accent but that's ok) Edited by tmp011007 on 11 January 2012 at 10:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 10 of 19 11 January 2012 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe I'm the exception that proves the rule, but I'm usually not that impressed by people who are able to discuss the finer points of grammar or explain the etymology of some rare words in a foreign language. I'm usually more impressed by foreigners who can express themselves idiomatically, as long as they don't talk about what they had for lunch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5333 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 19 11 January 2012 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am not on a mission to declare Mezzofanti or Krebs bad. I am sure that they were both brilliant. I am merely pointing out the double standards, since present day polyglots are judged so harshly.
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| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 12 of 19 12 January 2012 at 9:28am | IP Logged | |||||
IMHO, only some present day polyglots attract constant criticism and it's mostly those who have a tendency to grandstanding. This has already been discussed at length in your other thread "Are we being too hard on the polyglots?." Are you suggesting that we should cut present polyglots more slack, because famous polyglots of the past cannot possibly have been that good because they didn't have access to modern technology?? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5333 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 19 12 January 2012 at 10:41am | IP Logged | |||||
No, I am suggesting that we judge both by the same standards. If we accept that someone can learn a language in a night - something which I personally do not think is possible, with or without technology - then we would have to accept that it would be possible for a modern polyglot - with technology. If we accept that Krebs "had learned French" from a dictionary although with a pronunciation which was not really understandable, then we must also be more lenient of modern polyglots, whose pronunciation is not perfect. Personally I kind of like having high standards, but I will not impose that on everyone else. I would like some consistency in our judgement, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 19 12 January 2012 at 10:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I listened to an interview with Erard, and he said that the winner of a 'prolific polyglot' competition was a an organist living in the Hebrides. I also remember from a HTLAL thread that an Italian farmer living on an isolated farm with his mother had published lots of dictionaries, grammars and so on about arcane Asiatic languages (and yes, I did check on the internet to make sure that at least some of those books existed). So living in an isolated part of the world doesn't hinder you in learning a lot of languages - actually it may be an advantage to live in a dump without too many distractions.
I'm personally old enough too remember a time before the internet and personal computers, and in spite of that we could learn languages back then. Mezzofanti may have had fewer good (and reader friendly) grammars and dictionaries at his disposal that I had in the 60s and early 70s, but in Bologna it seems that he had access to speakers of many languages as part of his job and because of his reputation, and he was clearly not afraid of approaching them to add to his collection. So we can certainly be sceptical about the level of number of his languages (including his pronunciation), but we can't reject the more realistic claims about his language skills just because he lived in another age.
The anecdote about Krebs and his French - if true - just shows that he could get a foothold in a langage without ever having heard it, and that in itself is interesting - most language learners need to hear a language before it 'sticks'. Whether we would accept that he could speak it at that stage is quite another matter. Actually I learned my first fragments of Italian and Spanish from language books, and I never said anything until my teacher in French in high school/gymnasiet heard about it and began to ask me questions in Italian and Spanish during our French classes. I'm fairly sure that my pronunciation at that point was at least as abominable as that of young Krebs, but I could read and to some extent write in those two languages. So I do believe that the anecdote could be true. In more general terms: being able to read or even translate from a language is a passive skill and should be kept separate from having active skills. But I could imagine someone being able to write and speak fluently (i.e. without stops and hesitation) but with such a atrocious accent that native speakers hardly could understand what he said (Joseph Conrad?). This is certainly a grey zone, and we can debate whether such a language should count, but it is certainly different from a case where you only know how to order a beer in Swahili, but can do so with an impeccable pronunciation, and it is also a far cry from just being able to read the language. Edited by Iversen on 12 January 2012 at 11:55am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6867 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 15 of 19 12 January 2012 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually, if you read the biography of Mezzofanti, the tale of him learning the prisoners' language overnight, as well as another one where he overheard a Latin and/or Greek lesson while doing something else with all the words still going into a deep part of his memory, both of these stories were considered just stories.
The author said they were interesting, but not true, and that Mezzofanti was simply an exceptional learner with his methods. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 16 of 19 12 January 2012 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
What I'm saying is not that they were impressed by my knowledge of grammar, but the fact that I could discuss it grammatically, terminologically and idiomatically correctly in the target language... which is easy because it's normally damn near identical to the English, or another language I've already studied. To put it another way, most of the irregularities and idiosyncrasies of any language are in the most common, everyday terms; whereas rarer stuff is regular. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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