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Gregg Cox "Greatest Living Linguist" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6605 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 34 25 November 2007 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
In the sample entry pages, I noticed that the Turkish word for "sun" is given as günes instead of güneş. Is this an anomaly or are these pages typo-ridden? 1 person has 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 18 of 34 25 November 2007 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is not just a question of typos. The Faroese translation is given as "sólskin", which is the word for sunshine (we have the same word in Danish), against "sol" in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. However even in English you can use the word 'sun' with this meaning: "I go out into the sun", and the same thing is seen in the other Scandinavian languages. Which of course shows the flawed thinking behind such a dictionary: when even a seemingly innocent word like "sun" can cover two different meanings (or rather a whole host of derived meanings), then the idea of translating more complicated words with just one word in each language is patently absurd.
Whether or not Cox is the new candidate to the title as the world's greatest linguist is quite another matter. Even bright people can get silly ideas, though they rarely result in a book series consisting of 25.000 unusable pages. Edited by Iversen on 26 November 2007 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Scott Horne Newbie Canada Joined 6227 days ago 34 posts - 38 votes | Message 19 of 34 25 November 2007 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I caught other errors as well, and I merely glanced at the thing. But the big problem is a fundamentally incorrect idea of how language works. One would expect any bilingual person, never mind the "greatest living linguist", to know that languages are not just relexifications of each other.
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| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6921 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 20 of 34 25 November 2007 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, at least he does seem to have a lot of language resources. Problem is that if you enlarge the picture, it is plainly obviously that none of them have ever been read. I have about twice as many books and while I have yet to use a number of them, most are well-read and show the wear and tear.
Here is a link to a previous thread with articles listing his languages (he can read and write in 64 languages, but is only fluent in 14??): Gregg Coxx - Power of Babel Article Previous Thread Edited by translator2 on 25 November 2007 at 7:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 34 25 November 2007 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For certain values of 'read and write', and 'fluent', discrepancies such as 64 vs 14 make perfect sense. Similar values are given for several people in "The Art and Science of Learning Languages". Back in the realm of mortals, for sufficiently low values of 'read and write', I can do so in a number of languages: I can get the gist of a fair percentage of texts in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, etc, and have written (badly) in German and French, but I wouldn't dream of claiming fluency in any of these languages at present; I'd hesitate to even claim a beginner level in the ones I have not studied, but which are somewhat transparent to relatives I have a better knowledge of.
That said, I wouldn't call Gregg Coxx's claims 'dubious', because they don't appear to deserve even that much credence. Scott Horne's observation of how Gregg Coxx's dictionary appears to display no knowledge of the idea that languages are not just relexifications of each other is spot-on. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Scott Horne Newbie Canada Joined 6227 days ago 34 posts - 38 votes | Message 22 of 34 25 November 2007 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Similarly, I can read a few dozen languages with the aid of a dictionary, though I may not understand everything or pick up on every nuance. I once wrote a couple of short letters (a few sentences each) in Tamil by spending a couple of hours with two dictionaries and an ancient reference grammar, but I wouldn't claim to know Tamil; in fact, I can't even exchange greetings in the language.
Guinness appears not to have the expertise to determine who is the "greatest living polyglot" ("linguist" is the wrong word here). I recommend that they drop the category altogether. 1 person has 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 23 of 34 26 November 2007 at 3:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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The earlier thread mentioned by Translator2 is in fact this one Edited by Iversen on 26 November 2007 at 8:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 24 of 34 27 November 2007 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This guy's claims and the type of dictionary that he has devised (you guys have already said what I was thinking on the utility of this so called 225 book), proves once and again, like with Ziad and others that, as we say in Spanish, those who have more tu shut up for, are the ones that speak more or louder.
These funny characters seem to attain glory by showing up in the Guinnes Book of Records (with its clear ignorance on how to tell who is the "greatest living polyglot") or in tv shows. Meanwhile, people like Ken Hale, who really did contribute to language and languages, claimed to speak only English, Spanish and some American Indian languages. In my opinion, this 225 book could have been written in much few time, just scan some dictionaries, extract the words, send them to Excel and use VLOOKUP to match them. The utility of this type of word to word translations is more than dubious, but it will need much less space than that "encyclopedia" of words and you can carry it with you in your memory stick. So much knowledge, so many hours devoted to languages to end up producing simple conversation books that any bilingual translator or lexicograph can do write way better and with more insight into the languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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