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Fictional Polyglots | ||
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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 33 of 82 18 February 2011 at 3:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Kind of like the movie "Babel".
That would be a fun book. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6033 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 34 of 82 18 February 2011 at 9:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Professor Otto Lindenbrock in Jules Verne's Voyage au Centre de la Terre. In the novel he demonstrates knowledge of German, Danish, Icelandic, Latin, and at least a bit of English. At one point Jules Verne writes something like "He was a polyglot, that doesn't mean he spoke all the 2000 languages of this world but a good part of them".
p.s. oh. it was already mentioned. my bad ^_^' BTW I don't know if 2000 is an accurate figure for the total number of languages. It probably depends where you put the line between a DIALECT and a language, and also if you count historical variants and various dead languages. Edited by Sennin on 18 February 2011 at 11:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5019 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 35 of 82 04 March 2011 at 1:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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As my first post on this forum... I couldn't help contributing to this whimsical thread!
Only the "old timers" here may remember Clark Savage, MD aka. Doc Savage. Apparently he could speak nearly all modern languages, as well as many "dead" languages passably. "Mayan" was always my favorite language he spoke! This is a wonderful forum you have here.... Michael 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6251 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 36 of 82 04 March 2011 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is a fun thread.
I don't think anyone has mentioned Sydney Bristow from the TV show Alias. She was supposed to speak English, Russian, German, Greek, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Vietnamese, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian. Most of the other characters on that show displayed a knowledge of multiple foreign languages as well. The character of John Blackthorne, from the 1970's novel Shogun learned Japanese in addition to being raised bilingually in English and Dutch and having already learned to speak good Spanish, Portuguese and Latin. In the play Pygmalion the character Nepommuck knows 32 languages, among them English, Greek and Hungarian. Edited by portunhol on 04 March 2011 at 6:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6469 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 37 of 82 04 March 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
That would be so awesome! Tiny market for it though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6251 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 38 of 82 08 March 2011 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
Though we don't see this in print we are seeing it more and more on the big and small screans, at least I am. The latest Che Guevara movies, with Benicio del Toro, were shot almost entirely in Spanish even though it was an "American" movie with mostly bilingual actors and a monolingual, English speaking director. Apocalypto had a similar situation if I remember correctly. TV shows like Lost have long segments and almost entire episodes shot in the language of the natives (English, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, French, etc.). I hope this trend continues. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5955 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 39 of 82 08 March 2011 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
I enjoy movies like this, much better than pretending that all the characters speak English (even if you give foreign-speaking characters some exaggerated accent so that we can tell they are foreigners). However, the huge difference between a multi-lingual film and a multi-lingual book is that such films typically have subtitles, which would look mighty peculiar in a book. As Sprachprofi says, pretty isolated market - something like Lost (mostly English, some good chunks of Korean, some snippets of Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, French, etc.) would be fully comprehensible only to someone who spoke English, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and French. And once you have sold your novel to both of those two people in the world, you're kinda out of luck. Might be more opportunities of this sort as the print media more fully morphs into something more interesting from a technology perspective. Edited by Spanky on 08 March 2011 at 6:59pm 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 40 of 82 09 March 2011 at 2:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think books used to do this to a degree. I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" and sections of the dialogue were in French. And not just "oui" or something like that, but whole conversations.
I've heard that the same thing was done in some Russian books, but I've never read any of that. Yet. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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