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Motivations for becoming a polyglot | ||
Tags: Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4649 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 49 of 60 07 October 2013 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Oh, and you can answer them all? How interesting! Please tell us the one and only truth. And when you're done, please also answer the following questions: How am I supposed to live? How do I get happy? How can we achieve a just society? Why do people have to die from hunger? How can we end war? Why is there so much violence on this planet? I am very much interested in the answers science gives to these questions. And I also don't see why it is more important to create theories about sub-atomic strings than finding answers to the questions I asked. Thank you! @montmorency: Why should every slightest outburst of real discussion be censored and suppressed? Edited by Josquin on 07 October 2013 at 7:17pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5765 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 50 of 60 07 October 2013 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not an adherent of religious dogma, so I have no "one and only truth" to offer you.
I think the point you're trying to make is that science can't answer all important questions. Which I completely agree with.
It depends where those theories lead to. The reason you're not living in poverty, thinking about hardly anything else but where your next meal will come from, is because scientific theories often lead to great improvements in our quality of life. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4649 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 51 of 60 07 October 2013 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
So, you probably shouldn't have said that science could tell us the most about our place within the universe. I agree that scientific discoveries have been important for the development of our civilization, but it simply isn't true that science has the answers to: "Who are we and what is this all about?". Science can give us information about the universe, but we still have to interpret what this means to us. So, stating that science was the first duty of a polyglot is pure exaggeration. The humanities have their merits, too. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5765 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 52 of 60 07 October 2013 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Those aren't mutually exclusive statements.
No offense, but you're really just putting on display your ignorance of science with statements like this. Who are we? We're the product of four billion years of evolution on a planet revolving around an unremarkable star on the outskirts of an unremarkable galaxy in the cosmos. We're related to every last organism on our planet, from monkeys to trees to bacteria, as revealed by DNA. Within us are the remains of exploded stars. In short, you can't even begin to talk about "who we are" without this scientific knowledge.
I never said that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5150 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 53 of 60 07 October 2013 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I find the Brandenburgische Konzerte a better answer to Josquin's question than yours. But of course, there is an infinite number of meaningful answers to it and yours is part of them as well. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4649 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 54 of 60 07 October 2013 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I am most certainly not ignorant of science. The only question is how science is relevant to my personal life. Your materialist conception of the world makes humans to mere accidental products whose lives have neither purpose nor meaning within an indifferent universe. Based on this information, the question who we are and what it is all about only begins! How can I fill my life with meaning? Does living make any sense at all? Is there any chance that there is some sort of higher power or is matter all? If matter is all, how does it organize itself? If matter is all, how is the mind created within our brains? How did life start on earth and why? Is consciousness only an illusion? Do we have a free will? And is love more than just hormones? And what is beauty and art? In other words: Is life just an accident or does it make sense? No offense, but you just showed your ignorance of the questions of the humanities. If you don't ask yourself these questions: Good for you! But if you're interested in leading a meaningful life and ask yourself about your place within the universe, you can't avoid them. Science and humanities don't exclude each other, they're only looking at the world from different angles. So, I already said it twice and I'll repeat it once more: Science can give us information about the universe, but we are the ones who have to figure out what this means to us and to our lives. Edited by Josquin on 07 October 2013 at 9:25pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5729 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 55 of 60 07 October 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I just realized I haven't responded to the original question asked by the OP nor have I directly commented on the discussion that is now taking place in this thread. This is an interesting thread, and I like the way the conversation has turned into to a debate about the value of science and the humanities in education. I will write a little about science and humanities, but first I want to answer the original question posed by the OP. My motivation in 2006 was just to learn another language, which I figured was better than simply wishing I knew, or could learn, another language. I began learning Afrikaans that summer, even though I didn't really know what I was doing. When I found this forum in 2008, I had never heard the word polyglot and had no idea what the word meant. I joined this forum to get a little advice, and motivation, on learning Afrikaans and told myself that maybe I would finally learn Spanish. I don't know if I have ever seriously thought about becoming a polyglot, I just like actually learning languages. If I do become a polyglot that's great, but right now I think my real goal may be to acquire as much knowledge as I can about any subject that interests me. As for the natural sciences and humanities I find both to be very valuable. I am unclear on what constitutes being an "intellectual" but if I ever wanted to become an intellectual I would expect to be very well-educated in both. I think that one problem is that since the end of Age of Enlightenment learned scholars have believed that it was both possible and wise to separate philosophy from natural sciences and then insisted that scientific inquiry is the best way to gain knowledge of anything whilst largely ignoring everything else. I don't think this perspective works as well as we would like it to work, Josquin has already mentioned some questions that science hasn't conclusively answered yet and I'm sure we could list many more, because our conceptions and perceptions of science are actually based on philosophy whether we realize this or not. I think that the natural sciences, as they are currently understood and explained, are based on empiricism and naturalism. By empiricism I mean that science assumes that all knowledge is acquired through the five senses; i.e that which we can see, taste, hear, smell and touch and that the scientific method will eventually answer every question we have asked or will ask. I define naturalism as meaning that when the limits of empirical inquiry are reached there are allegedly some absolutely fixed laws which govern all things in the universe. Unfortunately there is no good explanation for why scientists are so sure that empirical knowledge is the best kind (the senses can be fooled after all) and scientists are even less clear about what the absolutely fixed laws that govern our universe are, or where these laws came from. Edited by mick33 on 08 October 2013 at 12:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4427 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 56 of 60 08 October 2013 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I only speak one additional language to a high level so I don't consider myself a polyglot. I don't really aspire
to be one either as my life is divided between English and German speaking situations. Anywhere else I go in the world will be as a tourist. I realise there's no official definition of the term polyglot but my personal threshold would be 5 languages (including native). There are places in the world where people do naturally acquire 3 or 4 languages. It is also possible to learn a block of extremely similar languages as style yourself as multi-lingual. I think polyglotism must push even further. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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