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Sorrell Booke | ||
Tags: Actor/Actress | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 7120 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 7 17 October 2006 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I searched for Sorrell to see if a thread existed, and there was none. Our fat little buddy was a polyglot.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0095368/bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_Booke
Does anyone know his other 3 languages. We know he spoke English and Japanese. If he was an intel officer during the Korean war, could it be he also knew Korean? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6687 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 2 of 7 17 October 2006 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Russian and Korean. That leaves one.
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| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 7120 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 20 October 2006 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So we know he speaks English, Japanese, Russian, Korean, and one more. I wonder what that last language is???
What is most impressive is Sorrell learned languages from very different language families. I am surprised he did not learn a Romance language. I wonder why a white guy from the USA would learn Japanese and Korean rather than French or Italian. I wonder if he had an Asian girlfriend? That is the only thing I can think of which could motivate me to try and tackle a language like Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6687 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 4 of 7 20 October 2006 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like how two of the ones he learned were cat.3 languages for English speakers, and at least one was a level 2. I would be curious to read more about how he learned them, and which others he had some knowledge of, since people who learn more than 2 languages beyond their native stock tend to have ideas about how at least a few more work.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6705 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 5 of 7 20 October 2006 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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According to this:
http://members.aol.com/KMHolmes1/boss.html he taught himself. They only list Russian and Japanese. By the way, they make it sound like he was fluent in five languages other than English. Maybe we're miscounting? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 7120 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 7 21 October 2006 at 1:07am | IP Logged | |||||
That means we are missing 2 languages! This gets more interesting. According to that website, it says he went to Colombia University at age 16. He must have been a prodigy. He also has a masters degree from Yale. Those are two very prestigious universities. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7159 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 7 21 October 2006 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you look at the bottom of the wikipedia article on Brooke, there's a link to "Jewish-American Actors". Thus he also has Jewish roots. This would account for Hebrew and/or Yiddish even though the only mention to his Jewish side is on Wikipedia's list of Jewish-American actors. On the biographies that I have seen so far, there is no mention of it nor to any knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish.
According to the link by Raincrowlee, Brooke's grandfather played in the Czar's military band before coming the USA. Languages: English Russian Hebrew (probably) Yiddish (probably) Japanese Korean Perhaps he got interested in Japanese or Korean because of World War II and was curious about "the other side" (in the case of Japanese.). From 1910 to 1945, Japan was occupying Korea and perhaps Duke's interest in Japanese led him to Korean. I don't think that a romantic connection was the likely cause of his interest. Mixed-racial relationships were quite rare in those days (esepcially ones between Orientals and non-Orientals). I suspect that it would have been scandalous if the teenaged Brooke had been caught dating a Japanese girl during the 1930s or early 1940s when Japan was strenghtening its military and getting more hostile toward the USA. I'm not too surprised either by his apparent lack of knowledge of or interest in Western European languages such as French or Italian. Most immigrants to the USA for the first part of the 20th century were trying harder to assimilate or at least encourage their children to adopt to the American lifestyle. If he had ever got any exposure to for example Italian thanks to meeting an Italian neighbour's kid, I'm not sure if that would have provided enough of a spark, since that Italian kid was probably being encouraged to fit in and learn English. The attitude then was quite different from now where immigrants and their children are more keen to highlight their ancestry. Edited by Chung on 21 October 2006 at 1:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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