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Francis Sommer | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7259 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes  | Message 1 of 5 26 March 2005 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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A man named Francis Sommer was supposedly awarded a prize from the Linguistic Society of American in 1997 for knowing 94 languages. Apart from a newspaper article about this, I have never been able to learn anything more? Has anyone else? Edited by administrator on 28 March 2005 at 3:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marcus Groupie Australia Joined 7214 days ago 55 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 2 of 5 27 March 2005 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
I assume you are referring to the article that appeared in the New York Times. I just read it and its quite interesting. Here is the link if anyone is interested. I liked the part about the Aussie from ANU who by the time he was 6 spoke 10 different languages, partly because each member of his family spoke to him in a different language when he was growing up! Edited by administrator on 28 March 2005 at 3:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 3 of 5 28 March 2005 at 3:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Here is the article:
New York Times, (12/31/97), p. C21. To Masters of Language, a Long Overdue Toast By WILLIAM H. HONAN NEW YORK -- Each vocation or avocation has its Babe Ruths and Baryshnikovs, and so it is with the Linguistic Society of America. The champion is Francis Sommer, fluent in 94 languages. Sommer, who died in 1978, grew up in Speyer, Germany, amusing himself by inventing languages. While still a schoolboy, he learned Swedish, Sanskrit and Persian. On a visit to Russia, he picked up all the major European languages. By the late 1920s, after emigrating to the United States, where he found work as a research librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, he knew nearly eight dozen languages. There were no Olympic medals or Nobel prizes for him, but that is a mistake that should be rectified, said scholars coming to New York City on Jan. 8 and 9 for the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America. "People like Sommer are amazing examples of human achievement, and just as unusual as those who do the decathlon," said David Perlmutter, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at San Diego. Language acquisition will be a major topic of discussion at the convention. Linguists are teaming up with psychologists and students of the brain to understand how a high school student from Brooklyn learns to speak French. Other linguists are focused on language preservation, contending that endangered languages like various American Indian and aboriginal Australian languages must be saved for the same reason that biologists seek to protect endangered species. The diversity helps understand the structure of all languages, they maintain. Strangely, linguists say, they know of no one who has made a scientific study of master linguists like Sommer or Harold Williams, a New Zealand journalist who died in 1928 and is listed (incorrectly) in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's greatest linguist, though Somers mastered almost twice as many languages. Williams, who spoke 58 languages, showed off his talent by conversing with every delegate to the League of Nations in his or her native tongue. Many polyglot professors wince at being called superhuman. "It's more like a musical talent than anything else," said Kenneth Hale, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who speaks about 50 languages. "I didn't do very well as a student. I wanted to learn languages, and I let everything else slide." Their motivation, they say, is the sheer delight of mastering a new form of expression. "When I found I could speak Navajo at the age of 12," Hale said, "I used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself." Perlmutter explained the fascination this way: "Each new language is like a fantastic puzzle and you want to learn how to do it. Sometimes it's easy because if you know English plus German, it's easy to learn Dutch. If you know Spanish and one other Romance language, Portuguese comes quickly. But of course, that doesn't work with Japanese." Stephen Wurm, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the Australian National University at Canberra who knows 48 languages, including one spoken in Papua New Guinea that he considers the world's most difficult, said the ideal way to learn a language was to have it spoken to you beginning at the age of 2. "The members of my family all came from different backgrounds and spoke several languages," he said. "When I was growing up, my father, who was a linguist himself, insisted that each member of the family speak to me in only one language. So my father spoke to me only in English, his father in Norwegian and his mother in Finnish. My mother spoke to me only in Hungarian and her mother only in Mongolian. That way I never got confused. "Then I traveled with my father to his postings in Germany, Russia, China, Argentina and Turkey, so that by the age of 6, I spoke 10 different languages." Hale said he could never learn a language in a classroom. "For me, it's got to be done with another person on a one-to-one basis," he said. "I start with parts of the body and common animals and objects. I learn nouns. Then I pick up the sound system. I write that down. "If it's not a written language, like Nggoth, which is spoken in Australia, I make up how to write it. I can learn that in one or two hours. Then I start making complex sentences because the complex sentences are more regular than the simple ones. Then pretty soon I can name anything in the world." Sommer left pointers in the textbooks he wrote about learning Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and German. But he was a better student than a teacher. When explaining how to speak Russian, for example, he offered advice that must have left many readers tongue- tied. For example: "Try to pronounce 'es' while holding the tongue in the position required for 'oo."' It would be a mistake to think of master linguists as shy, retiring bookworms. Edgar Erskine Hume, an American Army officer who died in 1952, spoke at least 10 languages and was unmistakably a man of action. He fought in World War I and World War II, and held two Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star with two clusters, the Legion of Merit, three Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart with two clusters. Speaking many languages has not always been a ticket to success. At least once -- in the case of Edgar Tibbetts -- it proved a liability. A self-effacing federal clerk who died in 1908, Tibbetts was employed by the Surgeon General's office in Washington. Modestly, he let it be known that he was fluent in 10 languages. That was not the half of it: He could translate from German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Romanian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Japanese. In 1904, he applied for a transfer to the Bureau of Military Information, where translators were paid a few dollars more than his $1,400-a-year salary. When his superior caught wind of his restlessness, Tibbetts wrote a letter to his own boss, saying that he was "indispensable because of his ability to translate from certain languages" and that his loss would "cripple the work of indexing." That put an end to his aspirations. Four years later, while riding his bicycle home from work, he collided with a horse-drawn wagon and was killed. Some master linguists confess that they live in fear of garbling the various tongues in which they speak. Toward the end of his life, Sommer said he had given up learning new languages because he was experiencing information overload. "I am afraid to cram any more words into my head," he told an interviewer. "Either the top will come off or some morning I will wake up speaking Babel." Likewise, Hale said he sometimes started speaking in one language and found himself unconsciously drifting into another. "Unless I'm attentive and really on the ball," he said, "I can mix up languages like Miskitu and Sumu, both of which are spoken in Central America and are very similar." Then he added with a professorial chuckle, "But I could never confuse Navajo with Warlpiri. Ho, ho, ho. Never with Warlpiri!" 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7155 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes 7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 4 of 5 17 May 2005 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have just sent an e-mail to the Language Society of America concerning this Francis Sommer, because he doesn't appear on their website's archives. I imagine that if such a polyglot really had existed, he would be bound to be on those archives, so I've requested them that information so as to be on the safe side.
I'll explain more when I receive an answer. Edited by Raistlin Majere on 17 May 2005 at 3:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7155 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes 7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 5 of 5 21 May 2005 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||
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It doesn't seem the LSA want to answer. Edited by Raistlin Majere on 21 May 2005 at 5:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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