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Mezzofanti judged today | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5333 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 19 11 January 2012 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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We all refer to Mezzofanti, and to the many languages he spoke, but I wonder how he would be judged today? I see how the polyglots of today are being judged ("He made an error in that sentence, the prosody is not right", etc) and I would imagine Mezzofanti and his likes would have been treated the same way. I read somewhere that Mezzofanti had met two foreigners, about to be put to death, and he was so sad that he went home, learned their language over night, and was able to take their confession the next morning.
Yeah, right. We all know how we feel about people who have made that sort of claim on this forum. From the article about "Babel no more" I took the following extract about another polyglot, Krebs: ---------- His passion for languages was launched when he found an old French newspaper, and two weeks after a teacher gave him a French dictionary, he showed up at the teacher’s desk speaking the language. ------------------- Like I said: Yeah, right. Today anybody who makes a claim like that at this forum will be asked to write somethng, or make a video on YouTube, and they are exposed after a few hours. So although this would be the HTLAL forum equivalent to the Norwegian expression about "cursing in church", I still need to ask the question: Would we today accept Mezzofanti as speaking between 40 and 70 languages, some of which he had learned in hours or days, and without any audio or live people to practice with? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 11 January 2012 at 9:59am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6782 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 19 11 January 2012 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Because legends are important to culture and we like to believe that certain historical
people were brilliant? Otherwise it would turn out that our greatest hero would be someone documented like Arguelles. Not even a cardinal, learning in the age of plentiful grammars, recorded sound and the internet, it's really much too easy frankly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 19 11 January 2012 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I find discussions about the fluency levels of past and present polyglots rather pointless. If they're dead, we'll never really know how fluent they really were and if they're alive, they often only inspire heated discussions about their fluency levels and methods between fanboys and detractors.
To put it quite bluntly: I don't care how fluent other polyglots were or are, because their fluency has no effect whatsoever on my language studies. Maybe those obsessed with evaluating polyglots should take a page from "famous diglot" and one time esperantist W. Shatner.
I don't think that this is a such an impossible feat. After all, during a confession, the confessee will most likely speak most of the time and Mezzofanti only needed to learn the most common prayers and some other religious (and non-religious) phrases commonly used in such a situation.
Again we're back at the infamous fluency discussion. Even someone as obsessed with languages as Krebs could obviously not reach the same fluency as someone who studied the language for years. However, given his dedication to languages studies, I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached somewhat of an A1 level equivalent, which was probably enough to impress his peers and his teacher who probably never encountered an autodidact. (For more information on Krebs in German see Das "Sprachwunder".) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5333 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 19 11 January 2012 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Mezzofanti: I thought you would have to understand the confession, in order to give absolution. How do you learn the vocabulary of somebody's sins in a night? How do you tone your listening comprehension in a night. Without audio? Krebs: No, actually I am not speaking of fluency. I am speaking of how on earth anyone learns a language from a dictionary. If we had been talking two weeks with a good Assimil book, and plenty of audio and podcasts and whatnot, then yes - an A1 or even A2 would be possible. But this is a dictionary we are talking of. Lock yourself up in a room with a dictionary for two weeks and see how much of the language you can speak when you get out. How do you know how to pronounce the words, how do you know the word order or the grammar. In short, the language? I would think that we either have to admire these guys a bit less, or the present ones a bit more :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6148 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 5 of 19 11 January 2012 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Actually from the article that Doitsujin quoted, Krebs's feat doesn't seem so ridiculous. He actually spent months learning French from that dictionary and his pronunciation was awful when he came back to the teacher. He had, however, learnt the basics of the language. But he was not by any definition fluent. Remember that many dictionaries also give a summary of the grammar and basic pronunciation rules.
He claimed to be able in his later years to translate 33 languages into German and dabbled in many more, mostly only to elementary level. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 6 of 19 11 January 2012 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Not necessarily. People about to be executed would probably appreciate anybody that they could talk to in their own language and would most likely give them more credit for their language skills than they deserve.
Again, we don't know which languages he supposedly learned in a night, how long he actually talked to the prisoners, and what he said. You also shouldn't underestimate the quality of the textbooks/grammars that the church created. He only needed to be able to ask the prisoners about their crime, encourage them to repent (no matter what they said) and then absolve them of their sins.
You may want to have a look at the .pdf that I linked to in my previous post to learn more about his learning strategy.
We don't know for sure if all he had was only a dictionary. But even if that was the case, most dictionaries at the time contained a mini grammar, declension and conjugation tables, lists of irregular verbs etc. And his French pronunciation left much to be desired:
BTW, a newspaper would be the equivalent or a raw frequency list that would have helped him to learn the most frequently used words first. Edited by Doitsujin on 11 January 2012 at 3:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 7 of 19 11 January 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Mezzofanti has at least spoken to a number of people in their own languages, if you can trust the biography attached to this forum. And one of the more interesting details is that he apparently had group conversations with persons from several countries where he spoke to each one in his (her?) own language. That points to the type of polyglot who actually try to speak his languages. The exact level can be difficult to determine, except in a few cases like English, where no less than Byron has vouched for his provess (if my memory hasn't deluded me). Edited by Iversen on 11 January 2012 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 19 11 January 2012 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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OK, so this is speculation, but read any old Bible or prayer book, and you're getting a lot of "translationese" -- most Bible translations showed visible signs of being translated from the Latin Vulgate.
Even now, high register English is characterised by structures and vocabulary drawn from French and Latin. So (playing Devil's Advocate) could Mezzofanti's job have been made easier by only needing to learn Latinised high register versions or his target languages? My personal experience is that people are far more impressed when I discuss the finer points of grammar in a target language than when I tell them what I had for lunch, but general vocabulary on sandwich fillings varies more between languages than technical terminology, so the grammar stuff's actually the easy part.... 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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