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IQ needed to be a hyperglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| 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 73 of 164 05 July 2006 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
How do you think math can be considered a language? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6856 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 74 of 164 05 July 2006 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's got its own vocabulary and grammar, for starters. On the other hand, it's a written language. You're not going to find yourself conversing in it at the bus stop, anyway. Wikipedia explains it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7014 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 75 of 164 05 July 2006 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I personally think that the main point of a language is to allow people to communicate ideas with each other. Maths does this, albeit in a different way to other languages.
Katie's link describes more or less what I meant. EDIT: When checking what I wrote, it occurred to me that we've really deviated quite a bit from the original topic throughout this thread. Edited by patuco on 05 July 2006 at 4:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7103 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 76 of 164 05 July 2006 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
You can hear the word here (it still confuses me too). Being an autodidact just means you teach or have taught yourself something, whereas being an auditory learner mean your listening skills would be your main way of learning.
Likely you're an NP according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. There's a thread about this personality test and its regards to language learning here. I think one's skill in maths or languages doesn't necessarily mean you'll be good in the other. 1 person has 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 77 of 164 05 July 2006 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure that's true, actually. At least in a way: The original question was regarding IQ's relation to hyperpolyglottery. So, yes, by and large we have deviated from the topic of IQ, per se, but the IQ is a single measure of intelligence, and it seems to me that we are still very much on the topic of that, at least intelligence in terms of picking up new skills and how. That's how I justify it. ;-) Edited by Journeyer on 05 July 2006 at 5:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7014 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 78 of 164 05 July 2006 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. At least our current discussion makes more sense (to me!) than certain parts on previous pages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Coovertown Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6728 days ago 57 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Korean, English* Studies: French | Message 79 of 164 05 July 2006 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was wondering which side of the brain allows us to use linguistic skills better. Too bad I'm mostly a righty...I guess I should build my left side up a bit more.
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| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6778 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 80 of 164 12 July 2006 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am happy to see the topic is being looked at in a very healthy pinch-of-salt-taken manner. That's good, cause certainly never wanted to discourage anyone, quite the contrary. And about the thread straying away, thank you Journeymayer for your feeling theres some sense to it, I hope now to make it clear. So I am back to the grind with a few more points on "what makes a polyglot tick" (maybe precisely I focus on hyperpoliglots):
When I found out this site I devoted a couple of days to carefully perusing through the Mezzofanti's biography and the fascinating thread on Ziad Fazah. Being somewhat acquainted with what we could call "the psychology of gifted and profoundly gifted people", I felt that I was doing the reading in a perspective that others didn't, thence the idea of contributing with a new thread complementary of the other "a gift or hard work?". Here come some psychological traits typical of gifted people that I see in those two enfants terribles of polyglottery: - Selftelicity, I think that's how they call it (but "se non é vero é bene trovato"), e.g. the psychological tendency to pursuits often without much practical meaning just because the subject find them a meaning. This is clearly seen in Mezzofanti's case, and can be presumed in Fazah, since well, learning more then 3 languages necessarily HAS to be "sefltelicitous", few people if anyone at all really need 20+ languages - Psychological intensity: DaveM explained this very well regarding Ziad Fazah. I bet there's a biological basis, as a writer said "all literature is but the expression of a pathological condition of the nervous system"; therein comes the no-so-nice factors in a gifted person that can lead to trouble (it is not a question of, if you have it, great, if you don't, nothing to do, that's for sure; there are lot to read, for ex. "Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential" Marylou Kelly Streznewski) Naturally the hard work factor you discuss in the other thread is to be taken into account, but I d rather dont do it so obvious it is in the first place (is there any high achievement under the sun which does not take hard work?-dont like the word "hard" btw rather say "passionate" "continuous", etc.), and second because I feel it derives naturally from the "psychological intensity" factor, which in turn comes from the high cognitive ability condition. As you see, I thought of IQ as the central factor because from it, it is possible to organize the rest, while the other way round cannot be done with ease. Take the Arguelles family story told in the forum. Ardaschair said a brother of him simply couldn?t care less about polyglottery, so unlike him and his father, set out for a career in something else, music, I seem to remember, where he is very brilliant. Ergo, says Ardaschair, hard work is what leads to hyperpolyglottery. I feel this argument is flawed. I rather see this as a high IQ family whose members can use, and actually use, their high cognitive ability for a variety of intellectually characterized activities, out of vocation or maybe chance. In other words, Ardaschair could have by some twist of fate turned out to be some physicist or guitar player instead of hyperpolyglot (what a terrible thought for forumers). About g-free faculties btw: a top dog in this, Arthur Jensen, said in an interview that it happened to him he had the opportunity to evaluate children in a music school for musically gifted children; music is purportedly a very g-free thing, but he found nonetheless that the average there was 125. - A keen sense of humor: all of you who have talked to Fazah report these; humour being something like a mind-slipping over, no wonder the ones with a powerful mind develop a penchant for joy slipping and keep the others slipping all the time - High moral standards, humanity, affability. References to this are endless from everyone (including some of you who have talked to Fazah) in both cases. - A surprisingly wide range and depth of interests, however having a logical flow in the intellectual life of the subject. Ziad Fazah apparently moved on from accomplished linguist to computer matters. DaveM said he is an expert fighter too. This is very characteristic of gifted people: they work intensely in some matter, then reach a point they feel they have what they were after and move on, in around 2 years typically (languages is a very special thing in that it uses to be for life). I know of a guy who, without much formal education, is knowledgeble in a wide range of medical matters, oriental philosophy, romanic art, rural life, creative writting, astrology...all this seems unconected but believe me, I know the guy and all are just sides of only one and the very same enquiry, which I wouldn?t be able to put into words. Is the kind of person people say, fuah, this guy know everything. So I didn't share the surprise of many for Fazah to have learnt in an intense foray to the realm of language and then relatively having stopped, (very relatively) - I ve forgotten the word for this one; something like a natural intermingling of intelligence and emotions; as other typical gifted individual, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, said: "whatever in me thinks, feels; whatever in me feels, thinks"; this enhances next one, as everything deeply felt makes a lifelong imprint in memory; as I said high IQ individuals use to have very increased sensitivity, often leading to psychological tremors on the face of what ordinary people would regard as relatively unimportant. At the same time, all this pretty rather emotional factor can lead to too much changing jobs, or not developing contacts, etc., which can lead in turn to a surprising social underperformance; some of you said why Fazah didn't see his dream of being a UN interpreter; for me was to be expected. - An innate ability to see common patterns even in apparently unrelated things (making feel normal people "I can't follow you", "you are insane") and, therefore, a tendency to enjoy finding out "how things work", in my terms, the grammar of things, often looking for a solution through the mixing of different things; all people who has shaken history, the arts and sciences, is like that, high IQ; if you look at things like evolutionary theory, the failed weird language explaining why is so important how we were treated when small children even when cannot remember, impresionism in painting, the theory of clash of civilizations, etc. etc., they are all remarkably simple grammars (few elements move according to few rules), it just took genious for a simply genial genially simple new combination; well, clearly, the grammars of natural human languages are an eat-me readily available target for the enquiring mind of gifted people. I ve pasted from the article about Sommer in another thread in this forum: "Perlmutter explained the fascination this way: "Each new language is like a fantastic puzzle and you want to learn how to do it." I ve got the feeling that normal and down normal cognitive ability people simply dont enquiry much; brilliant people enquiry about the "grammar" of particular fields; gifted and profoundly gifted people aim to understand the grammar of Universe, and get a near religious experience of it, difficult to explain to someone who never felt it. -A powerful memory. Isnt this an interesting problem?: I believe it has been ascertained that for a C2 level in a language you need to have an active vocabulary of around 25.000 words, and there are figures for every level of language command (I suppose passive knowledge, or derivative words, etc. will be bigger, I dont know, but even if the figure is wrong, the point stands ; lets forget by now the fact that linguists dont know what a word is or what to count as one). I reckon Ziad Fazah to be a C2 in around 20 languages, a C1 or B2 in around 10, a B1 or A2 in around 30, Mezzofanti probably more C2s but more or less along those lines (I know subjecting Mezzofanti to the European Framework of Reference is hilarious). You do the math for me, but you get the point. If an educated adult monolingual speaker have X "words" in his active vocabulary, a hyperpolyglot Richard Burton style can have easily 15X. Now, I suppose everybody here uses the Substitutive Word mnemonic trick; arguably, the more you know, the easier it is finding a link for you; but even so, an increased ability to find analogies and associations must be essential to ingest so fantastic amounts of verbiage. Whether you focus on lexical items or combinatorial rules machine, if it is true that a different part of the brain is used in language learning as an adult, if must identify itself or coincide in most lines with the general cognitive ability, the cortex, I seem to remember. - A psychological need for greatness, greatness being understood in as many ways as gifted people are. Check this out: "Greatness, who makes history and why"Dean Keith Simonton. Now, if you do really really want to understand how a Mezzofanti and Fazah are possible, you can't look at it from "normality". Lets face the basic fact: speaking 50-60 languages is not normal; we can say: it is unnecesary, superhuman, out of this world, hard to believe, etc. Whoever got that far was moved by a superior ideal or a sense of greatness that it is difficult to explain to normal people; as I know many of you are hispanophiles, some Spanish poet?s verses for you: "la vida que yo veo anhela los extremos/ con fines del desierto, la selva y nada más", is something like that. Lady Skywalker, one of those little-rock retainers-dwellers, said above "it is not a race, I rather enjoy the process..." something like that. Well, a relaxed feeling, great, (but dont come and join the ones doubting in fact envying Fazah etc), however IT IS a kind of race for linguistically overachieving individuals, cause there is another living style: the thrill of pursuing something one feels is great, the superior intensity of pushing yourself to the limit, which puts the whole personality in a state of maximum performance, a "state of grace" that the gifted individual ends up pursuing by itself often with a compromise of things such as financial security, family, etc. In other words, the penchant to lead a life moved by "superior ideals", that's a trace of intellectually gifted people. Picture for instance Zamenhof, other polyglot, litteraly killing himself in night after night of extrenuous travail without foreseeable reward getting his universal language ready, an idea that btw seemed to have crossed Fazah's mind. I have no direct indication of the following in the biographical information we have, but can be mentioned: -Doing more of the same amount of linguistic exposure. About Ziad Fazah, what people found hard to believe was not so much that someone had the wits to get his head around all the rules and the memory and patience to get all the words in his head, but rather that, to top it all, he would have the time, resources and circumstances to get exposure enough to all the languages so that they would get started in his head (as was said, the equation have the words+ have the rules= speak a language doesn't work, exposure and maybe production are needed too). Half the solution to the riddle was that actually many of the languages he had only in the get-by level.Futher, however, I believe a through-the-roof IQ might have a say in the exposure conumdrom as well. Gifted children are known to start talking exceedingly early (unless some sort of Einstein's phenomenon), sometimes even teach themselves to read. It must have to do with the overall higher general cognitive level. My point is: I don't understand why this should change as the subject grows older, beyond the normal developmental fact of whatever language is at hand acquicsition. I don't think the parents of giften children, though normally gifted themselves, offer to their offspring more than the normal amount of linguistic input, although would be an interesting thing to check out. -Increased ability to concentrate (even need to). This is not very important, but can help in the study. Language learning in that scale means concentrating and memorizing not very interesting pieces of information repeated in as many times as goal languages are aimed . For example look at the names of the months of the year in Polish or Basque. Names of months is not very enthralling thing so attention will tend to drift. Memorizing them is not small job even with the help of mnemonics, just imagine that 20 times; even in the many languages with almost identical words that "almost" must be noted and stored. Naturally later there are more enjoyable things to do, such as reading meaningful texts or talking to people, but to stick to it in the initial necessary breakthrough a tendency to engage in nerdy autisticlike activity must help. You could say the job might be done by bits through exposure but when we are talking 50 languages even someone with so much varied exposure as Mezzofanti had to resort to bookish sources, not that bad even in his time. - Increased metacognitive activity. "Metacognitive" means thought about thought, i.e. greater awareness about and reflection on your own thought processes (Descartes's philosophy seems to me an exorbitant piece of metacognitive activity). Again, it is not very important, but can have a role in language learning because experienced language learners usually are acutely aware of their own learning styles and what works for them in the language front, what the point of possible forgetting happens so that crucial revisions are done for the stuff to find its way into long-term memory, (language learning being partially a problem of long-term storage), etc. After all, investigation about language is partially investigation about the mind (see for example Wittgenstein). I know of a guy who developed a fantastic method to learn Chinese vocabulary by creating what he calls "evolving fantasies", taking into account that 4x4 tones=16 kinds of words I seem to remember, pardon me if wrong, and locating them in 16 different locations in the real world! Nobody without a knack for metacognitive activity embarks in things like that. One real challenge to the theory you have rightly and constantly opposed is: why areas of reportedly low IQ averages often display "natural polyglottery". My answer is twofold: actually, verbal intelligence of negroids is relatively good; second and most important, a linguist whose name cannot remember wrote a book elaborating on the apparent fact that developed countries have only 1-3 languages, while non-developed show remarkable linguistic diversity (he didn't claimed causality, of course). Well, clearly, when European countries went through the historical processes of industrial revolution and national shaping, one of the languages in their territory was sort of chosen, standardised and disseminated through massive schooling, so leading to a process of linguistic shift the end of which, by the way, can see today in funny attemps to keep what still survives, and many times rightly so why not. The point is: you have many populations in developed countries who have been put in a kind of "unnatural" state of monolingualism, so their potential for it going sort of "dormant": they lose flexibility, but in compensation they use to have litterate full mastery of their only language; funny enough, small countries don't show that and, as boundaries went down, the trend is now in great measure reversed, so there you are! The question must be looked the other way round: if someone with a low IQ gets by in several, what could be expected of a 150 in ideal circumstances of exposure and motivation? My answer: Mezzofanti. Look: I read an interesting article about the posible linguistic base of the hopeless state of education and literacy in Morocco (done by Morocans so don't come up with silly bias-hunting). As you might know, in Magreb countries was put in motion an Arabization process so that French was somehow discontinued in an attempt to improve educational results. First thing researchers found, actually people want to stick to French. But most important, trying to emphasize Arab if at all lead to a state in which graduates were incapable of writing a decent text either in French or Arabic, you see? If you don't know those languages you might thing that is an enviable multilingual situation, but deep inside it is of awful illiteracy. When you know better Africans and the like, you come to realize at a point that the european languages they had were but a bundle of ever repeating linguistic clichés interspersed with tags like "man" etc. Of course we are bound to face many instances in which the theory might appear wrong, but not overall. It is a bit like the thought/language relationship,Sapir-Worf kind of thing. I am not up-to-date what it is said about it nowadays, but I suppose is still a non-hard version of the theory. If we think of them as two circles, perfectly both superimposing we feel must not be the case; completely apart, same thing; but most of them superimposing not perfectly seems about right. Equally with a posible relationship IQ/language learning ability. In those margins of no overlapping there are room for inconsistencies: you can have some adult with no experience whatsoever in language learning from a language with limited or very different sound inventory, and he will appear as terribly clumsy in spite of a high IQ, things like that. But with a high IQ he is more likely to work his way through a phonology treatise and solve the problem. But I feel we all somehow know there's something real there; all so many visit to this thread tell me that. My model explaining extreme polyglottery would take two more factors which you will probably regard as trivial and disputable: I) What Mezzofanti said and apparently nobody is seriously taking in: "It is not as difficult as generally thought. Once you know six or seven completely unrelated ones you can learn any number of them" Most of us here are, linguistically, European, so we have been always confronted with strongly standardized languages the most studied of them (Latin, French, English) are a bit off-the way in their families, so we have developed a difficult to change view of languages as discrete units, cut and dry, and difficult to conquer, something like a big store of words or a Chomsky style machine producing sentences with elements put toghether with no infinitely variable rules. This little squares habit in our minds (categories) is quite insidious. Do you know the old example, a sparrow, is a bird? we say, yes; a dove, is a bird? we say, yes; an eagle, is a bird? yes, we say but start to feel uneasy; an ostrich, is a bird? very uncomfortable; a penguin, is a bird? Now start the usual silly discussion on pinguins beings birds or not, or whether the category bird exist at all or not; so in everything else; they convince me to see categories (like languages, human beings, dialects) really existing, but with blurry boundaries. A lot of people dont have the feeling of the true linguistic situation in the world: not a collection of discrete units but something like a collection of fans opening up handled by the very same Language with capital L hand. Navigating through fans must not be as difficult as it seems, trouble is only the few who did it know it, I personally took their word for it, that's the sense of this part of the forum, isn't? 1)Let's understand these individuals 2)Let's get inspiration and hints from them for our (much less ambitious? is for you to say) purposes. So my theory of why not many people in history has learned 20-60 languages is the trivial one that, being unduly thought of as nearly impossible, next to nobody ever set out to it, so never reaching the point Universal Grammar is intuitively felt inside and whole families are felt as just variations of a theme. As simple as that. 2)Precisely, the ones who did it, consciously and passionately put the best of them into it, as a great artist or scientist would do in the work of their lives. This is clearly seen in the case of Mezzofanti, and his sadness for the relative intangibility of this trully artistic as well as intelectual achievement reminds me of the sadness of a memory artist building thousands of mental images and nmemotechnic systems condemned never to be seen at all by anyone else. (this is basically nonsense but the rythm of the paragraph needed something like that, thank you for reading -just joking :))
I hope I ve made it up for you with this post. Thank you for your feedback and remember, as important as the quest of truth is, people and their happiness is much more. I am convinced that whoever has real reasons to get "worked up" (as Caito'celliagh said) is extremely unlikely to spend their leisure time reading through this. So don't worry about anything, don't take any IQ test, believe in yourselves, and keep going no matter what. The worst thing could happen is that you end up learning "only" 3-4 languages, so what, really? Just some of you, dont "bash hyperpolyglots", please, because they can exist, they actually do exist; let them be the omen of your future success instead. Edited by sigiloso on 02 March 2007 at 10:10am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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