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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6499 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 9 of 41 24 September 2010 at 10:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The original question didn't demand advanced or native(like) fluency, only that the contestants can speak languages from several families.
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 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5643 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 41 24 September 2010 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I wouldn't qualify because I only speak languages from two language families (Germanic and Romance) and am learning Turkish (Altaic Languages) and I have no intention to diversify my repertoire onto another language family.
Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6811 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 41 26 September 2010 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
True, but we have to be careful how we define "speaks" (a debate which has arisen lots of times in the past). If I were to learn how to hold an extremely basic conversation in 50 different languages encompassing 10 or more families then I would "win" but I don't think that I would, in all honesty, say that I spoke the language and still keep a straight face. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 12 of 41 27 September 2010 at 9:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Germanic/Romance languages & Greek & Latin => Indo-European
Esperanto => Constructed Chinese => Sino-Tibetan Swahili => Niger-Congo Arabic => Afro-Asiatic However, my Swahili and Arabic are still quite weak, they're my goal for this year. I'm actually aiming at learning languages from totally different language families because it will give me new insights into computational linguistics. So I'd like to learn Indonesian next, or a Native American language if I can find someone to help me with that. I actually signed up for Laoshu's Navajo course but then he set the meetings at 4am European time... Maori would be fun too, but I have only a few materials. Edited by Sprachprofi on 27 September 2010 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 14 of 41 27 September 2010 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
No, never studied Toki Pona, unless you count leafing through lessons. It was on my to- do list and then I found that other languages were more of a priority.
Yes, I did, and he said he was going to consider other times - seems he couldn't find any. I also haven't heard any news about this study group. Maybe there were too few people who could make it. It's a pity, I heard Volte also wanted to take these Navajo classes and also couldn't because of European times.
Well, one of my paid projects is to build some machine translation software which eventually shall be able to handle more than 50 different languages including Arabic, Chinese, Yoruba, Indonesian, Aymara, Uzbek and so on, i. e. lots of different language families. It will use Esperanto as an in-between language. For a start we're working on European languages of course, but eventually, given the right funding and collaborators, the system has to be able to deal with all languages. For this reason, it's really important for me to see all the different ways languages might indicate things, to get rid of all preconceptions and avoid driving the software into a blind alley. For example, Swahili uses prefixes for conjugation instead of or in conjunction with suffixes, so my system has to be able to handle that. Swahili has a suffix that turns a word into its opposite - my system will be able to handle that as well, thanks to Esperanto. Arabic does a lot of magic on word roots, re-assembling words, and I'll be prepared for that. Whenever I come across an alien feature of a language, I immediately think about how I'll handle that. Then, there's the issue of vastly differing ways of expressing things across languages, for which I'll also have to find equivalents. It's fun. I enjoy the new perspectives non-Indo-European languages offer me, but I also have immediate practical use for them. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| habadzi Super Polyglot Senior Member Greece Joined 5370 days ago 70 posts - 106 votes Speaks: Greek*, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Hindi, French, German, Italian, Ancient Greek, Modern Hebrew, Arabic (classical), Indonesian, Bengali, Albanian, Nepali | Message 15 of 41 28 September 2010 at 4:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I speak Indeuropean languages (including north indian), semitic (Arabic, Hebrew), Malay- polynesian (only bahasa), Swahili (Bantu), and Japanese, in which I am rather weak. I guess that makes 5.
It's not a problem to add new language families in my head. Often vocabulary borrowings facilitate. If the syntax is more or less the same as other languages known well, a language of a new family is manageable (syntax even varies within a language family.) However, the multiple language families wreak havoc with pronouns and numbers in my head. The I, me etc. has m- combinations in indoeuropean, -i ending in semitic, saya in bahasa (don't know Tagalog), and of course watashi-wa in Japanese. New pronoun systems become hard to automatize. Swahili "I speak": ninasema, unasema, anasema, tunasema... forever i think of tu- as thou, but it is "we". As for numbers, I keep forgetting the order of bahasa if I don't use it for long. (Swahili mainly uses arabic numbers.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6235 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 41 28 September 2010 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Syntax varies a lot within some language families. Welsh, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Swedish and Sanskrit have substantial differences from each other.
This happens within language families too. 'je' is 'I' in French, but 'you' in Dutch; 'ich' is I in German, and 'they' in Polish. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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