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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4494 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 57 of 299 12 October 2013 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Futurianus, I think the better way to get some support would be to write a post that
doesn't require me to open a dictionary, check how many hours I have left before bedtime, and doesn't require me to scroll for three light years (oh wait, it measures distance, not time!) before I get to the end of it. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 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 58 of 299 16 October 2013 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I read all of Futurianus' long message, and basically I can see the point in getting acquinted with a number of language families as a logical sequel to the urge to learn a number of related languages -diversification taken one level further. The problem is that diversification comes at a price: learning three or four Romance languages fairly well and using them as a foundation for further work with the rest of that family is more 'economical' than learning one language from each of four unrelated language families, and the four single languages might not even give you the sense of bird eye's view which some degree of familiarity wih all the main languages in one family can give you. On the other hand you will learn more about the possible sspan of possible language systems from the four languages... with just one or two families you may get a too limited perspective on the possible features in human language, but to contravene I try to have at least some theoretical knowledge about a number of exotic languages, even though I so far haven't got any intention of learning them properly.
On important thing that comes to my mind when reading this thread is the difference between active and passive skills. It would be ridiculuous to put 27 flavours of English on your scoreboard just because you can understand them. But learning to speak those dialects consistently without mixing them up is quite another matter. I have worked with Scots and Low German, which technically are fullblow languages but in practice function as dialects of English esp.(high) German. And yes, it is easier those two than to learn for instance English and Navaho and Xhosa, but it is definitely not something you just do in a weekend. And in some functions, like call centers or journalism or spying you may actually have to be able to stick to one language variant at a time without interference from other known variants - although it normally doesn't really matter whether you are 100% consistent. Apart from that I don't want to lose the word "polyglot" just because some ask to much, others too little from possible contenders. I prefer not to stipulate a fixed number of languages, partly because of the problems with degrees of relatedness and other demarcation problems, partly because there isn't some simple principle for the necesary skill levels. But somewhere along the line you do become a polyglot if you keep adding languages, whether you accept the word or not. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2013 at 10:40am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 59 of 299 16 October 2013 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Really, this is all a foofaraw. What is there really to discuss? A polyglot is a person who speaks four or more
languages by most standards around here. And then there are the hyperglots, but that's another story. I know, of course, that certain languages are closely related and others are very distant, but in my opinion, if a language is recognized as such, then it is a language. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are separate but closely related languages. I have no doubt that learning distant languages is harder than a related language but a related language still counts as a language and requires a lot of work. A person who speaks French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese well is an accomplished polyglot in my opinion. Or I am to be convinced that these are dialectal variations of the same language and if you know one you basically know the other. If that were only true. Edited by s_allard on 16 October 2013 at 9:01pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4494 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 60 of 299 16 October 2013 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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So Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Bosnian are not the same to you?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 61 of 299 16 October 2013 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||
This is actually an interesting question. What we are seeing here is a an excellent example of how what was essentially a common language of a political entity- Yugoslavia - is diverging into distinct national languages with the breakup of the political entity. Here is a great article on the subject. Here is an excerpt: "With the breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed a 'nationalization' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s. It should be noted that the Serbian and Bosnian language standards tend to be inclusive, i.e. to accept a wider range of idioms and to use loan-words, whereas the Croatian language policy is more purist[4] and prefers neologisms[5] to loan-words, as well as the re-use of neglected older words.[6] Yet there is criticism of the puristic language policy even in Croatia. These approaches are, again, due to the different cultural, historical and political development of the three variants and the societies they are found in." To answer the original question: I believe that there are four distinct national languages that are very closely related. With time they may grow even further apart as they emphasize their national characteristics. Is this any different from what happened in Scandinavia over a hundred years ago? The fact that there is considerable mutual intelligibility between the Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian or Norwegian, Swedish and Danish does not mean that they are not distinct languages. But I think the subtext of the question here is that someone who says that they speak Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and a fourth language is not a real polyglot like someone who speaks French, Navaho, Mandarin and Hindi. I disagree; they are both polyglots but with different languages and differing investments of time and work. Edited by s_allard on 17 October 2013 at 7:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6943 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 62 of 299 16 October 2013 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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The problem of this approach is that it takes things at face value and falling for nomenclature. Basically you're a polyglot by virtue of the number of entities listed under "languages" regardless of the mutual intelligibility or overlap of those entities. In that case, if you were my prospective employer, you should have no problem with my listing half a dozen variants of English in which I have full passive and/or active command.
Would you consider someone listing Metropolitan French, Belgian French, Québec French and Louisiana French to be a polyglot? Just because each different or distinct doesn't mean that we can only think of them as different languages. The situation of the Scandinavian languages is quite different from what's observed now with BCMS/SC. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish effectively take as their respective bases distinct areas/points on a dialectal continuum of North Germanic. The intelligibility while high, is exceeded by what one encounters with BCMS/SC (especially in the latter's standard guises). BCMS/SC as I've noted above draw on the same dialect for standardization despite the fact that Serbian comes with two subvariants, and that native speakers of BCMS/SC sit on the Southern Slavonic dialectal continuum where the non-standard forms (i.e. "dialects" used by one ethnic group (e.g. Prizen-Timok and Sumadijan by Serbs) differ more than the standards passed off as languages in "Bosnian", "Croatian", "Montenegrin", "Serbian" In short the difference is that DNS took different points of a dialectal continuum as starting points even though those starting points are close to begin with. Those advocating separate languages for BCMS/SC face an inconvenient fact that the modern codifications took the same subdialect (although there are calls from among some each of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian linguists to magnify or incoporate non-standard elements perceived as exclusive to the speech of their respective ethnic groups to make the standards diverge more and align better with the clear ethnic/political division). 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 63 of 299 17 October 2013 at 3:39am | IP Logged | ||
There are two separate issues. 1. Is a language defined as a linguistic expression of geographic and political unit? 2. Is a language defined by a certain threshold of mutual intelligibility? I favour the first definition. because it recognizes the fact that what we call a language is simply an expression of national identity by the political domination of a certain historical dialect. Therefore the question isn't whether Serbian, Croation, Bosnian and Montenegrin are 70%, 80% or 90% mutually intelligible. The question is whether they are recognized as distinct national languages. We speak of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish as distinct languages because they are national languages. We don't say Danish North Germanic, Norwegian North Germanic and Swedish North Germanic. We speak of British English, American English, Canadian, Australian English, Indian English, Jamaican English, etc because they are considered national variants of the same language regardless of the degree of intelligibility or lack thereof. Let's say that sometime in the future the Americans and the Australians pass a law declaring American and Australian the official languages of their respective countries. For me, we would have separate languages and a person could henceforth say that they speak British English, American and Australian. Similarly, the day Québec comes an independent nation and declare le québécois the national language, then we will have two distinct languages that are mutually very intelligible. So, if Bosnian is not a distinct national language, then what is it? Should we call it Bosnian Serbo-Croatian? I don't think the Bosnians would be too happy with that. The question isn't whether the languages are mutually intelligible or not, it's whether they are recognized as separate national entities. Edited by s_allard on 17 October 2013 at 7:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5217 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 299 17 October 2013 at 4:02am | IP Logged | ||
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As I said earlier, the fundamental issue here is, as the OP pointed out, some people make a distinction between
"real" or what I would call the "hard" polyglots who speak very divergent languages and "fake" or"soft" polyglots who speak related languages. There is no doubt that certain language combinations are harder than others from a purely linguistic perspective. And speakers of those combinations should be admired for their accomplishments. But when you incorporate culture, history and accent, then the question of intelligibility becomes much more complex. I could see someone saying that they speak American English and British English as separate languages because they can be quite different. How many people can speak with both a Boston and a London accent and have both sets of cultural references? An argument could be made for saying that a person who speaks perfect colloquial Jamaican English and colloquial British English is bilingual because the varieties are quite far apart. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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