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Definition of Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5159 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 9 of 29 16 October 2010 at 5:33am | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe it's just me but that seems like a pretty vague and perhaps confusing definition. It sounds to me that in Gethin and Gunnemarks' explanation you don't really need to be very good at languages to be a polyglot. You could be the life of the party though, provided that you didn't get called out by a real speaker. By this definition it wouldn't be all that difficult for even the average person to become a "polyglot". I for one am pretty skeptical of claims of anywhere near mastery of 25 languages and as far as I am aware nobody has been able to adequately demonstrate this ability. I would love to see it. If they can they are likely locked up in the basement of the Pentegon, cracking codes or something. I would like to know who the four of the greatest were also? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 10 of 29 16 October 2010 at 7:08am | IP Logged | |||||
Their minimum is reading skills in 10 languages. Sufficiently advanced reading skills in 10 languages is nothing to sneeze at.
That was the "..." part - I didn't want to make the quote too lengthy. I got it from googlebooks. None of the four were from this forum, but I believe the book predates the forum. Edited by frenkeld on 16 October 2010 at 7:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5159 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 11 of 29 16 October 2010 at 8:07am | IP Logged | |||||
I am not trying to say that this is not quite an accomplishment. It doesn't seem extrordinary to me though, especially when you look at their criteria for speaking: fluent to basic survival skills. i don't know what the reading criteria is. It would just appear that using this set of guidelines, being a polyglot is not incredibly noteworthy. If that criteria were used on this forum I think you would see the number of polyglots increase substantially. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 12 of 29 16 October 2010 at 8:22am | IP Logged | |||||
I doubt that there are all that many forum members with reasonably advanced reading skills in 10 languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5159 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 13 of 29 16 October 2010 at 8:41am | IP Logged | |||||
I am not so sure. There are alot of tetraglots, septaglots etc. on this forum who are also studying other languages. I don't know how many actual polyglots are on here but I would hazard a guess that there aren't that many. If you took all of the septaglots and above and applied the reading at say an advanced level and speaking at say an intermediate level you may double the number of polyglots. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6378 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 14 of 29 16 October 2010 at 8:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can read comfortably in Swedish, English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Danish and Norwegian. I expect that the work to get to a good reading level in Italian, Spanish, Portugese, German, Dutch, Afrikaans and Esperanto wouldn't be too big, as I can usually get the gist of texts in these languages already. I am, however, completely lost when it comes to the spoken versions of these languages, as well as spoken Danish and to a large extent Cantonese. Reading a language is a lot easier than speaking it.
My personal usage of 'polyglot' is "someone who's not a monoglot". If you need to speak ten languages to be a polyglot, what do you call all the people in between? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5134 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 15 of 29 16 October 2010 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
Hmmm... You'd need to a coin a new word for this : ) By analogy from "polyglot", I'd suggest "oliglot" (grk. "oligos": small, few; as in "oligarchy": rule of the few). Unfortunately, while this would be the correct Greek formation, it sounds very similar to polyglot which could lead to some confusion. As to the ten being the cut off point, to put it politely it sounds like the authors in question pulled this out of their backside, like the rest of their "definition". Edited by cmj on 16 October 2010 at 11:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 16 of 29 16 October 2010 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
It is clear that one cannot give a precise definition of what constitutes a polyglot, so one should look at the spririt of any proposed defintion instead of getting hung up on the details, like the exact number. The sprit of Gunnemark's definition is that a person should be interested in a large number of languages. Presumably, to him learning French, Spanish, and German to the C2 level doesn't qualify one as polyglot, unless one can at least read in a number of other languages as well. This has always been my notion too - knowing a couple of languages well is admirable, but polyglots are into a lot of languages. Edited by frenkeld on 16 October 2010 at 6:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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