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When is it considered polyglottery? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7056 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes  | Message 9 of 43 11 May 2008 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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“Polyglottery” is a neologism, coined by me, to describe a new scholarly discipline. It is not about knowing any specific number of languages, but rather is about coming to understand Language on a deep level by means of studying individual languages and how they connect to each other. Indeed, the more languages you study from this perspective, the fewer you will feel that you know, so it is very much the opposite of the counting competition that almost inevitably leaps to the fore when polyglots are generally discussed. Once this discipline has been established, the range of definitions of the word “polyglot” will also have to be expanded accordingly.
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| Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 5906 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 10 of 43 12 May 2008 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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ilovelanguages, if you mean "At which point is one considered a polyglot?" then you will receive a few different answers. Some will place the threshold at four, some at five, some at eight, some at ten, etc.
Others might point out that by knowing (which encompasses speaking, reading, writing, and listening,) even at an advanced level, six or seven languages, might not qualify as being a polyglot due to the languages' close genetic relationship. Take these examples: Person A: English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, Faroese, Frisian, and Luxemburgish. Person B: English, French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sard, and Provençal. Person C: English, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Greenlandic, and Finnish. Person D: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Sorbian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Polish and Slovene. Persons A, B, and D, as respectable and praiseworthy their linguistic achievements and repertoires are, have nothing on Person C, who managed to gain advanced fluency in utterly different, truly alien languages to one another. Person A hogged the entire Germanic branch of IE, Person B did the same for the Romance languages, and Person D did the same for the Slavonic branch. All of these are arguably closely related, hence mutually intelligible to a higher or lower degree, since all these languages in the three scenarios were, not that long ago, a single language which diverged over time. But still, they are share an immense amount of common vocabulary, similar grammatical structures, and similar histories and development. Person C's achievement is nothing short of awesome. These "mere" six languages are so far apart from each other typologically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, historically, and culturally, that it would take a much greater effort to get anywhere near fluency in just a few of them as compared to the languages in the three other aforementioned scenarios. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 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 11 of 43 13 May 2008 at 6:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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Following ilovelanguages's analysis we could indeed say that anybody who knows 3 languages is a polyglot. That's a simple and operative definition which only lacks some quantitative measures to set a lower limit for what it is to 'know' a language. The trouble is that most of us have the idea that polyglots should know MORE languages than most people, and then we have to consider what the baseline is and we also have to consider whether the number covers a lot of similar languages. The notion becomes cumbersome and ill defined, but it is closer to the reality than any criterion based on a fixed number of languages.
As suggested by ProfArguelles, polyglottery should really be seen as a state of mind rather than as a one-dimensional scale. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2008 at 9:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6173 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 12 of 43 13 May 2008 at 6:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, come one!!!!
It's easy. There are monoglots... bilinguals... and then there are polyglots. Polyglot is a normal English word. You can't start coming up with special cases concerning language families etc. This really is embarrassing. Here are a pack of polyglots not being able to work out the meaning of the word polyglot. Actually I would suggest to the prof. and other forum users that there is another word - 'hyperglot' which might be more appropriate. I really think that most users here want to move beyond being mere polyglots to the realm of being a hyperglot. Though I'm not sure how standardised the word is. I first came across it in an article in New Scientist. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 43 13 May 2008 at 8:08am | IP Logged | |||||
The use of the word 'poly' in English is not that simple; it is not a substitute for 'many' as one counts 'one, two, many'. There are monoglots, diglots, triglots, and so forth; it's simple to form these words up to arbitrarily high numbers. There is no clear cutoff point at two or three or four. dictionary.reference.com has several definitions of poly-. Ones of interest:
I don't think anyone would reasonably call a bilingual person a 'polyglot', but poly- is used in the sense 'more than one' fairly often (for instance, in 'polymer'). Polyandry is having more than one husband at a time - two qualifies. Etc. Etymologically, the notion expressed earlier in this thread, that a polyglot is someone who speaks significantly more languages than most people around him/her and/or a large number, seems to be fairly well-supported. We can debate on whether three is a large number (I think it's not), but that strikes me as a needless and pointless pursuit. The definition of an 'excessive' or 'abnormal' number of languages certainly varies regionally. 'More than usual' speaks for itself. If you're going to be pedantic, please be careful about correctness too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6568 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 14 of 43 13 May 2008 at 8:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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A close sibling to the word "polyglot" is the word "polymath", which defines a person learned in a wide range of fields. Someone with knowledge in two or three fields is not a polymath; someone with a deep knowledge in many areas and a familiarity with nearly everything is.
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| taKen Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mindofthelinguist.woRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5917 days ago 176 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Dutch, French Studies: German, Icelandic | Message 15 of 43 13 May 2008 at 11:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is so typical, but I'd go for more than two equals being a polyglot.
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| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6173 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 16 of 43 13 May 2008 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with the more than two suggestion. That's why I'm suggesting that this forum should perhaps switch to talking about hyperglots, hyperglottery etc. We certainly can't change the meaning of polyglot for our own uses... not without causing confusioin and further discussion in this forum anyway.
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