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The Mezzofanti table of languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Eidolio Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 6864 days ago 159 posts - 164 votes  2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, Flemish*, French, English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Greek | Message 25 of 41 28 February 2006 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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can you post a sample or describe the way some words are pronounced?
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| braveb Senior Member United States languageprograms.blo Joined 7200 days ago 264 posts - 263 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 26 of 41 28 February 2006 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I don't have greek script on my font. But I'll type the best I can from lesson one.
Khaire ho didaskaloss(loss as in locust instead of loss as in lockett) kai hoi paidess I once listened to Stephen G. Daitz for pronunciation of Ancient Greek and it was totally different. Unfortunately I don't have much knowledge of the pronunciation of Assimil and the proper way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Eidolio Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 6864 days ago 159 posts - 164 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, Flemish*, French, English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Greek | Message 27 of 41 02 March 2006 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
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The way you write it is the way you should pronounce it, except for the double ss - end sigma and "normal" sigma are pronounced the same way.
Don't forget to pay attention to the accents. Some people prefer to pronounce ou as (a long) "o" and "ei" as (a long) "e", because this is an older variant. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sinfonia Senior Member Wales Joined 6747 days ago 255 posts - 261 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 41 08 June 2006 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Vilas is right to question Mezzofanti's languages! Apart from the reasons he gives (notwithstanding some errors over dialects), there was absolutely not the scholarship in the early 19th century to allow anyone to learn languages to anything like a 'perfect' degree -- even today, many modern languages, even European ones with millions of speakers, have very poor dictionaries and grammars available to the potential foreign (and even native!) learner.
The internet can help out to a considerable degree nowadays, but not 200 years ago. Mezzofanti was a fraud! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6893 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 29 of 41 08 June 2006 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Or he was a genius. Such people do exist! Although I believe that he probably was not as fluent as he (or others) claimed in all of the languages...after all, what means fluency is different for everyone. Still, skepticism is always good and it's probably close to impossible to prove his abilities.
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| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7379 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 41 09 June 2006 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
You may want to read the Mezzofanti section on this website before passing such hasty judgements. Mezzofanti lived surrounded by foreigners and learned the languages from them. I assume a constant supply of live speakers willing to teach their language to be an acceptable substitute for Assimil. Furthermore, Mezzofanti did not 'claim' anything, the assessment of the skill he reached in each language is derived from travellers' accounts compiled by Russell. He did a very thorough job and laid out his methodology in the book, the entire text of which is on this website. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sinfonia Senior Member Wales Joined 6747 days ago 255 posts - 261 votes Speaks: English* | Message 31 of 41 09 June 2006 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
I did of course read about Mezzofanti before passing judgement! A 'constant supply of live speakers', in such a high number of languages, including dead ones (!), made-up ones and a number of dubious designation? Could he really have had a constant supply of Coptic or Ancient Armenian speakers? And remember, this is an exaltation written by a conservative ecclesiastic in the mid-19th century; virtually all linguistic and pedagogic theory dating from that far back has been superseded. I think it's got to be taken with a large pinch of salt! That's not to say he wasn't a great linguist; he just couldn't have been what Russell claimed he was. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6871 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 32 of 41 10 June 2006 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
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He had access to missionaries as well, though. These would have given him exposure to languages that he otherwise would not have had the chance to learn in Europe, for example the indigenous languages of North and South America. If he truly was a language genius, this may have been all he needed to obtain at least a working knowledge, if not conversational fluency in many such languages. Bear in mind that many languages he learned probably didn't have formal written versions, so learning to read and write them might have been subjective in any case. As for dead languages, I'm sure there were scholars back then who studied ancient texts, just as there are today. If he was truly passionate about languages, he would have found a way to obtain access to these: I know from experience that a driving determination to learn all I can about languages has given me the chance to become acquainted with information I would never have gotten otherwise. I don't see why it couldn't have been the same for Mezzofanti, and why he could not have pursued these sources of information until he had absorbed the languages fluently from them.
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