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’Must have languages’ for polyglots? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6381 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 57 of 149 24 January 2009 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Excellent; what are the morphosyntactic characteristics of each? What about Piraha? Nez Percé? (Tripartite) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6314 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 58 of 149 24 January 2009 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
They seem random. I've never heard of any of these. Of course there is no such thing as a 'true' polyglot. That's ridiculous. It's a subjective question about what languages are the 'best'. This could be all-round in many things. Linguistics, speakers, countries, families, grammar, phonetics, time(as ProfArguelles would no doubt vehemently argue! lol) and the list goes on and on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6381 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 61 of 149 24 January 2009 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You've never heard of Korean? I think Raчraч Ŋuɲa's point was simply that these languages have a lot of morphologically interesting features. For the ones on the list I've heard of, I'd tend to agree with him/her. As for whether there's such a thing a 'true' polyglot: I'd argue that there is, although the boundary may be fuzzy (and I'd argue, as others in this thread have, that the specific languages are irrelevant). As for 'This could be all-round' onwards, I really don't understand what you're trying to say; could you elucidate? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5760 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 62 of 149 24 January 2009 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Volte, your my man! Each language has interesting grammatical features not found in the other languages in the list. I don't know all languages, but I've come accross these languages in the literature as possessing features that I think would be useful if my mother language have them. Take as an example Tucano. This language is spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Brazil, even extending beyond the Columbian border. This language has a highly developed evidential system in its verbal suffixes, distinguishing visual, non-visual, inferred, and reported. To quote Aikhenvald:"Evidentiality is a grammatical category that has source of information as its primary meaning - whether the narrator actually saw what is being described, or made inferences about it based on some evidence, or was told about it, etc. Languages vary in how many information sources have to be marked. Many just mark information reported by someone else; others distinguish firsthand and nonfirsthand information sources. In rarer instances, visually obtained data are contrasted with data obtained through hearing and smelling, and through various kinds of inference." Wouldn't it be interesting if, say English, requires all speakers to mark their verbs for evidentiality? This would be handy in courts, debates, interrogations and discussions. Unless the speaker is purposely or unknowingly not telling the truth, we would know what's his/her basis for saying such and such. As far as I know, Tucano has the most well-developed evidential system (someone correct me if there is another language out there), at least among those languages that are already studied and published. Nez Percé is not appealing to me with its tripartite morphosyntactic alignment. I prefer Fluid/Semantic alignment. I think Austronesian/Philippine alignment is a fluid/semantic alignment with an overlay, that's why I have listed there Amis, a language spoken in Taiwan. The advantage of a fluid alignment is evident from the name, it is flexible, depending on the meaning and focus, you can construct either a nominative-accusative sentence or ergative-absolutive. Isn't it great to be free to construct your sentence, and think in ways unavailable to Indoeuropean and Sinitic languages, for example? This has an impact on the conciseness and subtlety of meaning by the way. Luckily for me, my mother language is Bikol and I speak Tagalog, but Amis has other disctinctions not found in either Tagalog or Bikol, although its not mophosyntactic alignment but the particles/determiners of its focus system. I've encountered Pirahã before, but what's striking is its "poverty": It doesn't have words for numbers and colors and limited phonemes and clause structures! The language is fit for nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Unless I want to live their world, there is perhaps very little that I can copy from their language that would enrich me. I like my languages to be expressive and not constrained. But it is interesting to language typologists and other scientists. Defining a polyglot is easy: he just have to speak many languages. The definition is silent about the composition of the many, as it depends on the reference point and purpose of the speaker. Its the "many" that's the bone of contention. For some languages, many is more than 1, others more than 2, others more than 3 or 4, others more than "a few" (6?). What is needed is a universally acceptable gauge, but I doubt if its forthcoming soon. Check out Bayso, spoken in Ethiopia, with a very interesting values of number feature on nouns. I don't have the time now to describe in an exciting way the interesting feature of each one of the languages, maybe sometime later. Yes, I am a "he/she", in that order. I'm a straight-acting male bisexual but since this is not a sexual preference forum, this is not the proper forum to comment further. (This is just to clarify my sex/gender since it is not evident from my handle/name.)
It's not an "all-round" list, it just concerns grammar. If phonetics, I would list different languages. A list based on speakers, countries, language families and time is not interesting at all. Another interesting list for me would be based on semantic distinctions. English is there as it has a lot of technical, scientific and cultural terms and continues to be in the forefront of research, creativity and publication. Don't take me seriously about the composition of my list. You have your own, just share whatever you have and why you like your list. I am interested in other people's list not because of what it has but because of why it is. As for my list, since its mine, I'm the only one who knows what's common about these languages and would seem random to anyone else. But I already told you, haven't I? Cheers. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 24 January 2009 at 6:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6314 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 63 of 149 24 January 2009 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Certainly. Everyone has totally misunderstood me. So I'll try to explain better. Firstly, can you define what you mean by 'true polyglot'? The definitions of the word true are: genuine: not pretended; sincerely felt or expressed; "genuine emotion"; "her interest in people was unfeigned"; "true grief" true(a): rightly so called; "true courage"; "a spirit which true men have always admired"; "a true friend" consistent with fact or reality; not false; "the story is true"; "it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for ... accurately placed or thrown; "his aim was true"; "he was dead on target" devoted (sometimes fanatically) to a cause or concept or truth; "true believers bonded together against all who disagreed with them" Ok so which of them do you mean? The word polyglot means: a person who speaks 'many' languages. Some definitions cite 2 languages or more. I think most people would agree with at least 3 or 4. I say 4+. Ok so someone who speaks 4+ languages and is 'true' to speaking those languages? I don't understand. If someone can define what a 'true polyglot' REALLY is then we could get somewhere. Until then it's just subjective interpretation of the meaning of what we are describing here. Now, what I meant before was that IF our definition of a 'TRUE' polyglot was a polyglot who spoke many 'different' languages so as to be 'well- rounded' then it would still cause a problem because you can be well-rounded in many different 'areas' of language. So you could be a polyglot who speaks many morphosyntatically interesting languages. But perhaps then you aren't well-rounded when it comes to phonetically interesting languages. And if you are then you might not be diachronically well-rounded. And if you are still that then you might not be language-family-well-rounded. And so on and so forth. Do you understand? There are many different types of well rounded and if that's the meaning of 'true polyglot' it's going to have to be one of them and not the other. And if a polyglot was to speak all of the languages necessary to be well-rounded in all aspects of language he would have to speak probably 100+ languages. edit: On closer inspection of the list I'd heard of Tamil and Korean. Woops. :P Edited by zerothinking on 24 January 2009 at 8:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LittleKey Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5894 days ago 146 posts - 153 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Japanese | Message 64 of 149 24 January 2009 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. Those will all be very useful for a polyglot to know.
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