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Definition of Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 25 of 29 17 October 2010 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
For some it is having interesting conversations in different languages at a party about the books in different languages one had read in the library earlier in the day. :) 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 26 of 29 17 October 2010 at 5:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good clarification regarding the reading ability Frankeld. In my opinion Emil Krebs would be the consumate polyglot. Such talents don't go unnoticed. I doubt whether, if he were alive today, he would be sitting in his flat eating day old pizza making You Tube videos. My picture of an ideal polyglot is someone who works in some diplomatic function facilitating world affairs. I remember in 1972 when Richard Nixon went to China (I was quite young mind you). One of the most striking things to me at the time was that there was a Chinese woman simultaniously interpreting the diologue between the two leaders. That was an interesting time in history and it would be hard to imagine the stakes being much higher. I don't know whether that woman was a polyglot or not, but to be able to demonstrate that kind of language ablity at such a high level is a remarkable achievement indeed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| flabbergasted Triglot Groupie Latvia Joined 6152 days ago 75 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Latvian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Persian | Message 27 of 29 17 October 2010 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Let us say that the reading criterion is: you can effortlessly read Thomas Mann in German, Proust in French, Tolstoy in Russian, Vargas Llosa in Spanish, Saramago in Portuguese, Umberto Eco in Italian, etc. How many members of this forum can do that? By 'effortlessly' I mean without consulting a dictionary every minute. Edited by flabbergasted on 17 October 2010 at 9:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 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 28 of 29 18 October 2010 at 12:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I would need a dictionary for Tolstoy. There might also be a couple of words which I might want to look up in works of the other authors, but probably not to the extent that I couldn't read those books without looking anything up - for instance during a travel away from my dictionaries.
But what are we doing right now? Is the purpose behind Flabbergasted's reading criterion to raise the bar so much for reading that a passive language can count as much as an active one? .. and if so, then at which level? If you can read Vergilius is that then 'as good as' being able to check in at a hotel in Rome in Modern Italian? Or is it even better? In my opinion it is more logical to ask for a fairly, but not inhumanly high level in a person's active languages ... and then demand the same thing for passive languages, but counting those separately. By the way: Latin is a relevant example here because even its closest relatives (or rather descendants) are so distant that you have to study it to be able even to read simple prose. But you can actually be able to read even difficult texts in related languages without much toil and labour. Even before I did my limited studies in Swedish I could both understand all normal texts AND understand spoken Swedish, including humoristic TV programs and small talk. But my reading skills in Latin are the result of hard work, whereas I got much of my Swedish for free by being Danish. In this situation I might be tempted to set the bar lower for Latin as a distant language than for a related one like Swedish or Norwegian. After this discussion I am even more reluctant to set any specific number as the one that defines a polyglot. Edited by Iversen on 18 October 2010 at 1:03am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5130 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 29 of 29 18 October 2010 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hm. I see that I am a more simple minded person than most of you. In my book, if you speak, read and write three or more foreign languages, then you are a polyglot, provided the languages are not too close and that your skills are passive only. If you are a Norwegian and your only foreign languages are Danish, Swedish and English, I would be hesitant to let that person qualify unless they were really fluent in speaking and writing Danish and Swedish.
I would also be hesitant to let a Frenchman who could read Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but not speak them qualify. Someone who could read Mandarin. Russian and Arabic in addition to his own language would however qualify in my book, even if the active skills were a bit lacking. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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