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Polyglot linguists | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6335 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 1 of 18 15 October 2007 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Under polyglots there are lists of actors, politicians, fashion people, but what about linguists themselves. Not in the sense of polyglots but the people dedicated to linguistics. It is not that obvious that all of them are or should be polyglots. We have a very well known case in Noam Chomsky, who claims that speaks only English although having changed the theory of language since the last century.
Instead, there are cases of linguists that have written books on many languages that they knew themselves. For example, Rasmus Rask, who at a certain point in his life mastered more than 20 languages and worked on a Spanish, a Frisic, an Italian...grammars. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6361 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 18 15 October 2007 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Kenneth Hale for sure. There are numerous accounts of him speaking dozens of languages with people throughout his life and career as a linguist. Here's his biography at wikipedia, and here are many letters written by friends and colleagues upon his retirement. There's a good thread about him here.
Recently, I had fun reading about Daniel Everett in the "world's toughest language" thread. He lists the languages he's studied in his CV. Like Ken, he also seems to be a guy driven by a passion to discover more about languages of indigenous people; he traveled to Brazil, learned Portuguese to near-native fluency, and obtained a PhD in the language to enable him to study Pirahã (the people and the language) in depth. Besides these two, I'd also be curious to learn more about Claude Piron. I haven't been able to find out anything about how he learned his languages, and I'm sure his story must be an interesting one. In addition to being one of the very rare UN translators who worked in more than three languages, there's a page here with articles he's written in over a dozen languages. Edited by FSI on 15 October 2007 at 2:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3 of 18 15 October 2007 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that essentially monolinguistic linguists like Chomsky are more an exception than the rule. At least in Europe every linguist would be required to learn several languages already as a student, and most would probably want to add a few languages more along the way. However few apparently get beyond 10-12, maybe because they have to be real experts on at least some of them to keep their jobs (and their self-esteem), and that is bound to take time from the more leisurely language accumulation that some people permit themselves to indulge in. Among the professional linguists that I have met in person the one with the most languages under his belt was probably the late professor Martinet, and as far as I know he didn't claim fluency in more than about a dozen languages. In the US the dominant movement among linguists before Chomsky was the socalled structuralism, which was basically a method to collect languages, - so many of these people probably also knew a fair number of languages. I hope that this tradition hasn't been totally lost through the Chomsky revolution, but maybe some of our American members know more about that.
Edited by Iversen on 15 October 2007 at 4:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 18 15 October 2007 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I provide no solid data, but it was always my impression that most American linguists, ironically enough, speak no language other than English.
For example, there's a foremost expert on Semitic and Middle Eastern languages who often takes part in heated Internet discussions on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and various dead languages. And yet, it appears he speaks none of them. Likewise, I've read the odd academic paper on Japanese written by linguists who appeared not to actually speak Japanese. Edited by Captain Haddock on 15 October 2007 at 9:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Renaçido Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5086 days ago 34 posts - 60 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Latin | Message 5 of 18 03 February 2011 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6870 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 6 of 18 03 February 2011 at 8:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I think in that video the third person there was probably the interpreter, but they edited out the interpretation because the subtitles are there.
EDIT: I watched more of the video and actually he does seem to reply immediately without need of interpretation. So I guess I'm not sure what to think. Maybe if Chomsky states himself to be monolingual it's that the cannot function in conversational French that doesn't pertain to his subject matter, but I'm purely speculating here, since one would obviously need to have pretty advanced skills for that conversation. Edited by Journeyer on 03 February 2011 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6441 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 7 of 18 03 February 2011 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Linguistics does not mean learning lots of languages. While the two often go hand in hand, there is no reason why you would have to speak lots of languages fluently to analyze them. Indeed, some field linguistics requires that you learn and analyze a language without being able to speak the language or have any communication with the native speakers before hand. Knowing another language, unless related, would be absolutely useless in that regard.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5088 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 8 of 18 24 March 2011 at 8:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I would echo what Declan is saying here. You don't need to speak multiple languages to be a linguist. In fact you could quite comfortably carry out sociolinguistic studies for your whole life in English speaking communities without ever feeling a call to speak another language.
That being said, most of the linguists or future linguists (which I most likely am) very much like language, and have a desire to learn more about it, whether that be playing with a language for an afternoon or putting in years to become fluent. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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