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Language Savant - 20 languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6374 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 3 06 May 2009 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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Hey, this might be interesting to some of you guys here so I thought that I'd post
about it. Christopher Taylor has a varying ability in over 20 languages. But he is mentally challenged and can't dress for himself or lead a normal life. He's a savant. I've known of this language savant for a while but the only material on him was vague and the videos on him were of very poor quality to listen to and watch. I've been watching a documentary on YouTube about savants and they mentioned him because he has turned their thoughts upside down. Language is usually negatively effected by savant syndrome. The theory was that left brain damage in the womb could be the main reason why savants see the world in the way they do. Their right brains are stronger so to speak. Anyway, here it is Beautiful Minds A Little Matter of Gender 3/5 He is quite possibly a one of a kind. My guess is what he has is not typical savant syndrome. It starts at 2:49. I suggest watching the whole thing because it's extremely interesting. Edited by zerothinking on 06 May 2009 at 11:52pm 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 2 of 3 07 May 2009 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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Another link to other videos apparently with the same man, Christopher. He can clearly also read newspapers upside down, but I didn't hear him speak or write freely. However the presenter said that he interacted with waiters in ethnic restaurants and things like that, and at the suggestion of a scientist he learned the Berber language under controlled circumstances. For instance it is said in video no. 2 that he was presented only with sentences with an explicit subject. However the Berber language has a rich morphology which makes it possible to omit the subject, and the linguist - who is eager to prove Chomsky's idea about linguistic universals - was in the seventh heaven when Cristopher by himself found out that the subject isn't necessary. The mischievous linguist even tried to teach him an artificial language that violated those universals, hoping that Cristopher would reach an impasse. And he did, whereas a number of 'normal' subjects were able to learn sentences with these 'illegal' features.
To me this seems like exploitation of a human guinea pig, and I find the conclusions of the professor somewhat shaky. I venture the guess that the learned man has a house altar dedicated to Chomsky at his office. Edited by Iversen on 15 November 2011 at 3:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Torbyrne Super Polyglot Senior Member Macedonia SpeakingFluently.com Joined 6097 days ago 126 posts - 721 votes Speaks: French, English*, German, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Catalan, Welsh, Serbo-Croatian Studies: Sign Language, Toki Pona, Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, TurkishA1, Esperanto, Romanian, Danish, Mandarin, Icelandic, Modern Hebrew, Greek, Latvian, Estonian | Message 3 of 3 23 June 2010 at 9:17am | IP Logged |
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Christopher Taylor was brought to my attention on YouTube following my latest video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0jO5lFRny4). I have included a link to a video about him on that video now too. It is interesting to see how Christopher goes through the languages he’s learnt. I found it striking that some languages he was happy to read and speak in. Then other languages, like Swedish, he was not willing to speak but could translate into English.
In any case it is fascinating to see what the human brain is capable of doing in certain situations. Daniel Tammet claims that he can show people how to “break out” of the “concepts” that “filter” knowledge. These are the words he uses, and it appears to mean that he proposes a method to unlock minds to think like he does. He says this in his video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIDMCC2SJek) about his book “Embracing The Wide Sky”. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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