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Article: The World’s Polyglots | ||
Tags: Press Article | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6715 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 5 16 July 2011 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The World's Polyglots Edited by translator2 on 16 July 2011 at 5:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5141 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 2 of 5 16 July 2011 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, I too could read a couple of Assimil manuals per year and "be able to communicate" in 60 languages by the time I am 60. Would that make me the "world's greatest polyglot"?
There is a colossal difference between knowing a language and having knowledge of one. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6664 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 3 of 5 16 July 2011 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This article gets some numbers wrong and also I wonder how many languages those folks had mastered. When a polyglot becomes well-known then his/her reputation gets carried and so even doing research on them might have findings that look official but are just based in hearsay.
Let's not turn this into another "master a language: define that" type discussion and accept the article for what it is, which is something that can be inspiring for aspiring polyglots to read. When I was younger, it was accounts just like those written in these PDF paragraphs that helped fire me up. An MIT professor mastered exotic and endangered languages? A European the mayor of Hong Kong? No one knew a better interpreter? To a novice, these can be really exciting sounding. Even to more experienced learners they are fun to read. :-) Edited by Journeyer on 16 July 2011 at 9:17pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Saim Pentaglot Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4879 days ago 124 posts - 215 votes Speaks: Serbo-Croatian, English*, Catalan, Spanish, Polish Studies: Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic (Maghribi), French, Modern Hebrew, Ukrainian, Slovenian | Message 4 of 5 20 July 2011 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How exactly can the Pashtuns be considered an "ethnic minority"? They are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan.
Huh? What does this refer to: Arpitan, Romansh, Alemannic or Lombard?
This sounds like nonsense to me. What does "dialect" mean in this context? Is it a nonstandard language (like the four abovementioned Swiss languages) or is it a variant within a language? If it's the latter, then what on Earth is "command fluency"?. I can easily imitate Carribean, Castilian, Mexican and Argentine accents in my Spanish, I can pretend to speak other ekavian or jekavian Serbo-Croat, and I know many more English dialects. They wouldn'tbe convincing imitations, though, so I really think that dialect learning (i.e. being able to imitate the speech of a given community) and language learning (i.e. being able to communicate full stop in a language, and not necessarily as a native would) should be lumped into the same category. Not to mention that Ziad Fazah has already been debunked. And how could Kenneth Hale "master" so many endangered languages that he'd never use in his daily life? Perhaps he had a good passive understanding, but I doubt he had a C1 level of spoken proficiency in each of them. In short, factual errors in this article really make me suspicious of its claims... Edited by Saim on 20 July 2011 at 5:28am 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 5 of 5 22 July 2011 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It is a problem that those who are mentioned on such lists rarely take pains to specify language for language what they know. I remember Kato Lomb as a noble exception, and - quoted from memory - she said that only around seven languages really 'lived in her'. A dozen or so languages were on a lower, but still respectable level. In some language lists passive languages have been included, and sometimes even languages which you only have studied, but not learnt to neither understand orally, speak, read nor write). Nevertheless some of those with extremely high numbers probably have active skills in a lot of languages, just not as many as quoted.
Personally I prefer looking at my language skills using a scale which goes from zero til something quite decent, and I would say that the list of spoken languages to the left of my name represent the languages which I can use for monolingual travels, but like Kato Lomb I only feel really at home in maybe half a dozen. On the other hand I can write in at least twenty languages and dialects... I'm sure that the same variation in language numbers according to criterium used applies to any other polyglot, even those who are better at the game than I am. Edited by Iversen on 27 July 2011 at 5:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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