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Nassim Taleb | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| M-Squared Senior Member United States Joined 7142 days ago 117 posts - 118 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 1 of 5 24 October 2006 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nassim Taleb is an interesting character. He was on US television the other
night commenting on a recent hedge fund meltdown. As this entry discusses, he is a successful and practicing quantitative financier, something of a philosopher in probability theory, and a polyglot. He is reported to know about ten languages, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic, and be an accoomplished reader of several dead literary languages. Nassim Taleb on Wikipedia "Fooled by Randomness" home page 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6828 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 2 of 5 25 October 2006 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting. I'm actually reading that book right now. I will now read it with
a new perspective. 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 3 of 5 25 October 2006 at 4:07am | IP Logged | ||
A quote from the Wikipedia article :
Does this mean that he can read English, French and Classical Arabic really well but cannot speak them to the same level as Italian and Spanish? Or is this a case where the wrong terms have been used to describe his abilities? Also, I'm assuming that the 10 languages listed there are the 10 languages he 'speaks' (whatever that may mean) but 4 of them aren't really spoken any more in the modern world. Does this count as being able to speak a language, especially if it says he 'reads' classical texts in these 'dead' languages? How exactly does he speak Latin and Canaanite script? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| M-Squared Senior Member United States Joined 7142 days ago 117 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 5 25 October 2006 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I think my phrasing was awkward. The article doesn't say exactly what his
fluency is. From his publication list, history, and television interviews, he is apparently quite fluent (all skills) in English, French, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish. His web site lists at least one academic paper in Italian, along with many publications in English, and he says he is a native French speaker. He lives in the US and does US TV interviews in English. As for the dead languages, as for all dead languages I think reading is what counts. I suppose almost anybody who reads Latin very well can sort of speak it, too, although that probably wasn't the point in learning it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 5 25 October 2006 at 8:21am | IP Logged | ||
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As I read the list Mr. Taleb can claim at least five active and passive languages and at least five passive languages, - however passive languages can be difficult to count because you often can read a language or dialect just by combining knowledge from other language with a bit of guesswork. But with languages sufficiently far from each other this problem is of course not as pertinent.
Quite generally it ought to be possible to mark purely passive languages, even in the system of levels in this forum. It is in my view immaterial whether a language is dead or not. If only seven elderly ladies in Papua New Guinea speaks a language, that language is as dead to me as Tocharian B. The only important thing is whether I can speak it or not. By the way at least Aramaic is still kicking and alive, and I have personally heard it spoken. It is in use as the church language in at least one town (Ma'aloula) in Syria. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2006 at 8:29am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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