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Ziad Fazah - does he exist? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6467 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes  9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 369 of 377 07 October 2007 at 9:05am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Xtremelingo, I was using 'we' in a collective sense. I could have repeated my other statement, but that would make my post too long. I hate reading and writing long posts. If you read my other previous post, I did say I have waited for more than half a year. I joined the forum in March, but I was lurking since January.
BTW, we are in serious discussion here. There is no need to pick on other people's wordings.
Your 'personal' feeling can not be used to falsify my statement. Again, my previous post should have answered your question:
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| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7147 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 370 of 377 07 October 2007 at 9:43am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The question posed orally in Persian (Farsi) on the video is:
Mikhaham az agha-ye Ziyad so'al konam ke shoma, dar amukhtan-e zaban-e farsi... meaning "I would like to ask Mr. Ziyad that, when you were learning Persian,.. i.e., the question was cut off in the tape, so the entire sentence couldn't be heard. The next thing you see on the tape is Mr Fazah saying, in Spanish, "en realided, esta diciendo me que...". So while the Iranian (or Afghan?) gentleman's reaction was clearly negative in the extreme, you really can't tell from the tape what his full question was. (By the way, his diction in asking the partial question heard was VERY clear, as was his rather slow pronunciation, as if intentionally speaking very clearly for a foreigner. After all, even I understood it!) So while there isn't enough spoken Persian on the tape to judge from that alone that Mr. Fazah didn't understand, the Persian speaker clearly felt, as shown in his reaction afterwards, that he flunked on that language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6467 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 371 of 377 07 October 2007 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I think we are having too much of bashing each other and irrelevant discussions. Perhaps it is about time to regroup ourselves and think about what we are actually discussing in this thread.
Here is my attempt to divide our discussions into 3 main areas: 1) Ziad's linguistic ability 2) The sources 3) Ziad's character 1) Ziad's linguistic ability Most of us would agree that Ziad is a great Polyglot. There is no doubt about it. So please stop making statements like 'I don't care if he can speak 58 languages or 25, he is a great linguist to me'. We are not disagreeing that he can speak multiple languages. But many of us are interested in which languages he is can speak well, which ones are semi-fluent, which ones he just does not know. Also, which ones he used to be fluent in the past, which ones he can pick up again at will, and so on. 2) The sources It would be great if Ziad can speak for himself in this forum, but it seems to be very unlikely. The secondary sources become very important. These include comments from Ziad's students, or anyone who has contacted him directly. But then, we cannot be absolutely sure if the information are 100% authentic. The next comes the authentic online resources. These include information directly coming from news site, but certainly not those quoted by unauthentic websites or even wikipedia. To me, the YouTube video seems very authentic. I do see the value of the recent discussions about the YouTube clips. But then it does not nullify the fact that Ziad can speak multiple languages. It just makes us skeptical about his claim of fluency in certain languages, in the year of 1997 at least. Please stop making statements like, 'come on, give him a chance'. This is irrelevant. 3) Ziad's character This is the touchy part, and I think we should all treat it with great care and respect. There is no doubt on Ziad's positive character as being a humble man, and also other good stuff. But then there are subtle things that some members want to discuss. For example, was he truthful when he claimed that he learned all the languages before he was 20? As stated in the very first post, this could mean 1 language every 3 weeks! This certainly raises a lot of skepticism. Then there is the YouTube clip. Why did he fake his answers even when he could not understand the questions? Could he just say he did not understand? I hope that our future discussions can follow along those lines. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 372 of 377 07 October 2007 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I agree - I googled two of the names in that article (Setsuko Iseki and Evangelia Sinopoulos) and the only thing that came back was the article itself. Do these people even really exist? Most of the things written about him by others on the net do not make sense or are contradictory (he had never heard of Esperanto? Dialects and languages on some of the lists that do not exist, etc. etc.). If only he had taken some time during all of these years to write a short (even a few pages) biography of himself to post here or on another site to help clear things up and to serve as a definitive source of information.
Edited by translator2 on 07 October 2007 at 1:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mlewan Newbie France lewan.chez-alice.fr/ Joined 6263 days ago 9 posts - 12 votes | Message 373 of 377 07 October 2007 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thanks! Very useful information! Well, yours is. Not the video, which apparently does not tell us anything about how close Fazah was to the real question. I do not know anything about romanisation systems for Farsi, but if someone could come up with a comparison in Latin letters between Fazah's pronunciation and what the Farsi speaker probably expected, that would also be nice. The Greek phrase at the end is still open for anyone who feels like taking up the challenge. We do not have much of Fazah's response there, but it would still be nice to understand what the lady said. (It is Greek, isn't it? I recognise a few words, but not enough to exclude that it would be something else. My Greek is at the Mickey Mouse level, so I can only say that she does not talk about Μίκυ Μάους or Ντόναλντ Ντακ. I just love that last transcription!) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 374 of 377 07 October 2007 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6336 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 375 of 377 08 October 2007 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Mmm, yes, try googling the last name, Tsitmitse and except for that entry, there's no other result. Curious because I was just googling different last names, Georgian, Hungarian, Basque, Danish , and at least, there's always several hits. Does this name exist? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| breckes Triglot Groupie Belgium Joined 6802 days ago 84 posts - 89 votes Speaks: French*, English, Russian Studies: Italian, Dutch, Swedish | Message 376 of 377 08 October 2007 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In fact, there is an error in the name, I found with Google that there is a "vice-cônsul" of Finland in Rio de Janeiro, who is called "Ritva Palmu" or "Ritva Palmu Tsitsimitse" or "Ritva Tsitsimitse". We can't expect a journalist to write a foreign family name correctly… Edited by breckes on 08 October 2007 at 12:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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