Talk:List of polyglots

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This article was nominated for deletion on April 25, 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus/keep.

Contents 1 Carlos Freire 2 John Bowring 3 Article title? 4 hint 5 Dubious claims 6 Let's move this article back to polyglot 7 Move proposal 8 where's JP2? 9 first confused me: 10 Hearsay or facts? 11 Correct links to languages 12 Let us cut the list 13 Proposed method to clean up the page 14 Polyglots in WIkipedia

[edit] Carlos Freire

He was here, but he has been removed. That's the man who's close to breaking Mezzofanti's record. It's not hearsay, you can check him at Cambridge's Outstanding Scholars of the 21st Century, which was published a few years ago. There is plenty of material to be found through Google, albeit in Portuguese. And he also has a book published with skilfull poetry translations from sixty languages, which I have (Babel de Poemas). He is the greatest polyglot in Brazil, followed by Fazah. Fazah has tremendous mnemonic abilities, and learned almost all of his languages during his teens, but he is not really a devoted scholar like Freire and both men know each other. 201.17.85.187 17:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I just found him down there. That's absolutely wrong. None of the men listed above was fluent in all the languages. When he says mastered, that's absolute fluency. The same can be said of Mezzofantti (mastered, or was fluent at, 60) or Somner. He has enough knowledge of all the others to make translations of complex texts or communicate with speakers, and has mastered their grammar completely (i.e. he can read them).

If we were to use the strange criteria that downgraded him, what would Rasmus Christian Rask be doing there, since he only had reading knowledge?

201.17.85.187 17:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

All the criteria in this list are strange. People are added to the list without any references at all. To make a translation from a language you often need close to no knowledge at all in that language - just a dictionary and a translation to a third language to check with, so you don't make any grotesque errors. The fact that Freire has made translations from 60 languages on its own says very little about his language skills. It is possible that he knows them, but far from certain. I have met professional translators with much more than one anthology behind them, who refused to speak a language they had translated hundreds and perhaps thousands of pages from. This entire page is bad, ill researched and badly structured. Moving Freire down was an attempt in correcting one piece of information, but I agree that many other "polyglots" on the list should be moved down as well. Please move him back down. I don't want to do it, as I don't want to start an edit war. Fell free to move other people down as well, as you see fit, if their claims cannot be substantiated.

I have googled for pages about Freire in Portuguese but almost all articles were the same interview copied over and over again. Mlewan 17:52, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually I'm working with first-hand information, I do know he *knows* the languages. There were some other pages besides that interview, I'll look them up later. For Fazah too, I've seen him being tested on TV a few times. For the rest, I really don't know, except Bowring, whom I have already put down there. If anyone is willing to discuss better criteria for this list, I'm all for it.

201.17.85.187 19:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Bowring

Bowring outrageous claim seems, as expected, a factoid:

Bowring later boasted that he could speak one hundred languages and knew two hundred. At the time of his death a more detached estimate placed him at the head of the world's linguists, with a speaking knowledge of eight languages, reading and writing knowledge of seven, and working understanding of a further twenty-five dialects. (http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/sirjohnbowring.html)

I'm considering him to know only 15, since working understanding doesn't specify if he could actually read in them or had only a instrumental knowledge that allowed him to understand sentences using dictionaries as aid. That would hardly account for knowing. If anyone knows of something, they can revert my change. 201.17.85.187 17:31, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article title?

Shouldn't this article move from "multilingual" to "polyglot": the article is about polyglots (people with the unusual ability of speaking dozens of languages) rather than multilingualism (the more widespread ability to speak two or more languages). Quite different from what is discussed at bilingual; this last article could be renamed multilingual, since there is nothing much special in speaking two languages fluently as opposed to speaking more than one language fluently. Then, the bilingual title would be freed for an article on "true" bilingualism i.e. people who speak two languages (or more ???) equally fluently. --FvdP

I (the original article's creator) concur. --Gabbe 16:31 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

Why was it moved? (I'm neutral just curious.) This page title originally was polyglot.--Jondel 01:47, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] hint

Georg Sauerwein (1831 - 1904) multlingual poet

Georg Julius Justus Sauerwein was born on 15. January 1831. His father worked as pastor in 0annover, Bodenstedt and Gronau in northern Germany. From 1843 to 1848 he went to the gymnasium (comprehensive secondary school) in Hannover. It is said, that he could read, write and talk about 60 languages, at least the following Latin, ancient Greek, New Greek, Hebrew , French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Portuguese,English, Welsh, Erse(native Irish), Gaelic(native Scotish) , Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedisch, language of Lapland , Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarus , Ukrainian, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Albanian, Turkish, language of Azerbajian, Tschuwaschisch ( could not find english translation: a caucasian language) , Tamil, Kaschgarisch (spoken in Siberia , similar to the language of Uzbekistan), Kumykisch ( spoken in Siberia), Persian, Armenian. Georgian, Sanskrit, Romani (language of the gipsi), Hindustani, Kabylish, Ethiopian, Tigrisch ( another language of Ethiopia ), Coptic, ancient Egyptian, Arabic, language of Madagascar, Malaysian, Samoan, Hawaian, different dialects of Chinese , Cornish, Aneitum ( language spoken on the New Hebrides), Manxish (language spoken on the isle of Man), translated from "Das Sprachgenie Georg Sauerwein" by Hans Masalski Oldenburg 2003 ISBN 3-89621-157-9

I guess "Tschuwaschisch" is the Chuvash language.

[edit] Dubious claims

I question the value of citing unsupported claims of vast numbers of languages that someone of the present or the past is "said to have spoken". Being multilingual myself, I have often heard vastly exaggerated accounts of my own linguistic abilities from people utterly unqualified to assess them. Many of the claims presented here, I'm willing to bet, are similarly distorted, with three words written in Chuvash magically becoming fluency in Chuvash or a reading knowledge of a dozen languages becoming oral mastery of a hundred. In any case, if no standard for evaluating linguistic competence is offered, the reader cannot begin to know what these claims mean.

I suggest that the list of polyglots be edited or dropped altogether. At a minimum, any attribution of a specific number of languages to a person should be supported by a reference.

Shorne 03:41, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Another dubious claim: It says here that Dikembe Mutombo speaks 5 african dialects, but his own biography page says 3. Which is it?

Patrick Corcoran 6 May 2005

[edit] Let's move this article back to polyglot

and turn the bilingual article into an article on multilingualism. --Erauch 15:38, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Move proposal

Multilingual → Polyglot

There is a consensus on the talk page for moving this page back to Polyglot, since it is about noted people who speak multiple languages rather than multilingualism in general. I added a paragraph at the beginning on multilingualism in general, but it belongs in its own article. The original move seems to have been done without discussion, and the only reason it has not been moved back is because someone put in a new page named Polyglot. So please delete the current Polyglot, and I will incorporate its contents into a disambiguation section. I will split the current page into Multilingualism and Polyglot. --Erauch 16:29, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I'd support a splitting the page, one describing the phenomenon and neurology behind Multilingualism, and one becoming a List of famous polyglots.

I've not moved this because it's not been made clear what to do with the other articles - where should the polyglot content go? If this is decided then please leave a message on my talk page and I will sort it out. violet/riga (t) 22:36, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] where's JP2?

Just wondering why Pope John Paul II isn't listed as a noted polyglot.

I suspect that he wasn't much of a linguist actually. Of course he spoke Polish and Italian as does every other Pole working in Italy for a long time so that's no big deal.

If you've heard him speak English you'd realise that it was pretty poor. As for those absolutely ridiculous moments when he used to make his Easter greeting in 50 or so languages, that was a joke. All he did was read them out. Anyone can do that. And some of his read-out languages were so appalling that they were just about incomprehensible and certainly a clear indication that for him they had no meaning other than what someone had told him they meant.

mlewan 13 Sep 2005: I wouldn't mind adding him to the list, but first someone should do some real verification of his actual knowledge. I bet he spoke Russian, having lived most of his life under Soviet influence. Probably some German due to the heavy German influence in Poland during and before WWII. When he gave a speech in Spanish in Cuba, it sounded fine to me. Being a priest he must have spoken Latin. And as most educated Europeans he probably spoke French as well. However, I have no proof that he spoke any of the above languages.

Cleopatra should be removed from the list, however. "said to have not required interpreters at receiving messengers" is taken completely out of context. What kind of messengers? Where were they from? If they were Greek, that's hardly surprising, as she was of a Greek family.

[edit] first confused me:

"On a visit from the Lord Byron, he surprised Byron by showing knowledge of certain things in local London slang that the poet himself was not aware of."

I didn't know what it meant by the poet. I had to read back and forth, and then click on Lord Byron, to realise what it meant. Maybe this could be restructed better. --coblin 03:52, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Hearsay or facts?

Unreliability of this article is utterly disgusting. If there are no reliable sources, don't publish. Period.

I agree with the above comment. The page may have made some sort of sense earlier on in Wikipedia's history, when a lot of stubs were added for later improvement. However, today the general standard of Wikipedia is much higher, and this page is far below the average. What about removing every single alleged polyglot from the list, paste them here in the discussion page, and add them back one by one if proper sources can be found? What is needed is not only sources that say "X spoke English, Swahili and Chinese", but also the reliability and the level of knowledge. Example: "X spoke English well enough to make himself understood with his barber according to letters from his friends, Swahili well enough to negotiate a peace treaty in a civil war according to newspaper reports, and he wrote Chinese poetry which was published in several editions, even though he never learnt to speak the language. The titles and editors of his Chinese poetry books were..." I realise that the list of polyglots will be reduced to close to zero, but to me this is the only way of making sure that the page contains any factual information. Mlewan 11:44, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind removing all names from the list and adding them again one by one. But citing sources AND commenting on their reliability is the all that can (and should) be done to improve the article and meet quality standards. Commenting on each and every language individually is not possible and not sensible either. Some articles about polyglots cite individual numbers for languages spoken, read and studied by the person in question. That's probably as close as you will ever get to the truth. -- Grapelli 06:24, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

It's not clear to me how you expect to obtain "factual" information. For Michael Everson for instance, you may as well take my word for it (I could easily pad the list with other languages I have studied). For J. R. R. Tolkien, I'm certain he was a polyglot.. .but what sort of "citations" would you consider "authoritative"? I think the disclaimers on this page are strong enough. Caveat lector, and people interested can go and find out more about the people listed here if they want more information. Evertype 10:51, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

If we could define what an "authoritative source" is, that would of course be good. But what I ask for is that the source and nature of the source be quoted - not that it must be above all suspicion. For your entry, I would be happy to see "mr. Everson himself claims that he speaks the following languages". I could also imagine a model like at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions with sections like "Sourced", "Attributed" and "Misattributed". We would need some other headers for the polyglot page of course. Any takers? "Sourced", "Alleged" and "Highly Suspicious Claims" perhaps? But I think we can do better than that. Note that much of the disclaimers on the page still would apply for all those sections. Mlewan 19:35, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, personally, I find a conflict in listing oneself on this page, or even participating in an article about themselves... in my personal opinion that would qualify as "Original Research", as you're reporting your first hand account. Of course, if you're not touching anything about you, we don't need to worry about you padding your information. Wikipedia is neither an autobiography, nor a resume... and I would say that it's impossible to keep a NPOV when discussing yourself. If you find yourself talking about yourself in the third person, then stop your edit and/or revert. --Puellanivis 01:10, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Correct links to languages

Is it too much to ask that editors who contribute to this page take the time to make sure they are linking to an article about a language, and not a disambiguation page? In most cases, I don't complain when these kinds of links get created, as they are relatively easy to fix. But when a page's subject focuses on language, I think that editors should be expected at least to create correct links to articles relating directly to that subject; especially when there are so many of them as there are here. I mean, to be specific, linking to German language rather than German, French language rather than French, and so on. If in doubt, preview the page, click on the link, and see what article you have just linked to. --Russ Blau (talk) 21:54, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Let us cut the list

People speaking 5-10 or slightly more languages should not really be on a list of noted polyglots, I think. Otherwise the lower part of the list will eventually include thousands if not millions.

Thanks to the person who cut them out. I cut out the "other" polyglots as well. First reason: there were no references. Second reason: none of them seemed worth mentioning. To be able to translate from 80 languages is no achievement, if you are allowed to use dictionaries and compare with other translations. (To make a good translation to your own language is an achievement, but it is of the literary kind and has little to do with linguistic skills.) The claim that Cleopatra didn't need interpreters is invalid, as long as one doesn't mention for which languages she didn't need any interpreters.

This still doesn't mean this page is good. There are almost no references at all. I'm still in favour of moving all the remaining "polyglots" to the discussion page, and only move them back after proper sources are given. The main reason I haven't done so already, is that I cannot see that we have enough sources for any single person yet to be called a true "polyglot". Mlewan 14:53, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed method to clean up the page

To clean this article up, I think some drastic measures are needed. The following "point" system is very un-wikipedic, but I cannot find any other method, and I have seen no other proposal either. The current way to make it to the list is also a "point" system, but it is much less reliable, as nothing has been verified. Perhaps the entire article should simply be deleted.

My first proposal is to divide the article into two lists - both probably very short.

List 1: Real life Polyglots

To make it to this list, a speaker should obtain 10 points according to the following criteria. The number 10 is chosen just because it looks nice. I feel a better number would be around 15-17, but that's just my feeling. 20 is probably too high for anyone to reach, if we require reliable sources as verifications.

2 points: Verified full spoken or written fluency in a language. It can be assumed that the speaker can discuss any subject with native speakers as easily in the foreign language as in the speakers own language. A certain accent and occasional grammatical errors accepted.

1 point: Verified ability to handle professional situations (like diplomacy or business discussions) in a language - spoken or written. Or verified ability to perform oral interpretation from a foreign language for a limited number of subjects. Frequent grammatical errors acceptable.

Closely related languages count only once. Examples: Both Serb and Croatian count only once. Both Danish and Norwegian count only once. Both Dutch and German count only once. Someone who speaks all of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Catalan can count only one language. It is of course impossible to define how close the languages may be. If it can be proved that someone masters the needed number of languages completely without accent or errors, and two of the languages are German and Dutch, we can allow the speaker some slack. If a speaker passes the criteria, all the languages can be listed next to the speaker's name, even if some languages are close.

To be able to read or translate written texts from a foreign language never counts as a point, as a lot of texts can be read well enough for simple translations using dictionaries. (This doesn't mean that it isn't impressive to be able to make beautiful translations from 50 different languages. It is just not necessarily connected with how well one can express oneself in a foreign language, and therefor it is not IMHO a criterion for being a polyglot. Besides it is impossible to verify how much the translator has used the original text, dictionaries, translations to third languages, and so on.)

To be able to order a beer, say thank you, ask for directions to the station, or to complain about the weather in a language does not count.

The list should be ordered alphabetically - not by "number of languages" as that is an arbitrary concept. You can make it to the list with five really well mastered languages or ten languages, where you barely get your message along to your business partner. It makes no sense to list the person with ten bad languages higher up than the one with five perfect ones.

Example: a person speaks English and Swedish with equal ease, even though he makes occasional grammatical mistakes in English. That makes 2 x 2 = 4 points. In addition he has been in work situations where he has spoken French, German, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Italian. French, Portuguese and Italian are so close that they count as only one language. Danish and Norwegian are too close to Swedish to count. So this gives just 1 + 1 = 2 points. In addition this person can translate at least simple texts from Icelandic, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Catalan, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Latin and Spanish with the help of a dictionary. That gives no points at all, as it is too easy to use a dictionary. This gives a total of just 6 points, and the person is not a polyglot. (The person in this real life example agrees.)

List 2: Anecdotal Polyglots

To make it to this list, the speaker should according to a fair amount of referenced historic sources have been considered to "master" at least 50 languages, even though it no longer can be confirmed.

An alternative proposal is to remove every single "polyglot" from the lists.

Replace the text "The following list must be seen as anecdotal" in the introduction with the following text: "It is impossible to make any even remotely accurate list of polyglots for the following reasons."

And replace the text "With this in mind, the following list contains some people who for some reason have a reputation of good language skills." with "Considering the above, the Wikipedia does not attempt to provide a list of how many "languages" any individual "speaks". Mlewan 15:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Polyglots in WIkipedia

Is there a list of wikipedians speaking 5, 6 or more languages ? I can't think about a way to compile that kind of data (babel userbox?).

KungFuMonkey 01:22, 4 September 2006 (UTC)