tolkien

some guy i talked to lately said to me that j.r. tolkien spoke 40 languages. trying to verify this i went on wikipedia. it is sort of helpful, in that i think i established that that was not true, but it still left me wondering about the details.

wikipedia says: "Tolkien learned Latin, French and German from his mother, and while at school he learned Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh, and Medieval Welsh.

He was also familiar with Danish, Dutch, Lombardic, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Middle Dutch, Middle High German, Middle Low German, Old High German, Old Slavonic, and Lithuanian.[147]"

i wonder what "familiar" is supposed to mean.

I'll bet he could read Old High German and Middle High German. If you know Old English, OHG is not much of a challenge, and if you know OE and modern German, neither is MHG.

Hardly any Lombardic (the Germanic language of the Lombards/Langobardi) survives. If you had it all in one place, you could familiarize yourself with the entire surviving corpus in ten minutes.

I'll bet he could read all the Germanic languages on the list with a dictionary at hand. I bet he had read some Old (Church) Slavonic. Wouldn't venture a guess about Russian and Lithuanian.

You list 25 languages. Add one for Modern English. Add 14 (which for Jorge Luis Borges is just another name for infinity) for the number of languages he constructed in his head. And that makes 40!
If you had a bet with this guy, I would recommend a plea bargain.

Polyglots include the following.. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism]

I really don't know if Middle English ought to be counted as a separate language from Modern English. You could learn it as well as you need to (i.e.e to read it) in a matter of hours or days.

In my second year at Merton College, I lodged in a building on Holywell St which had been JRRT's rooms, where he continued to live for some years after his formal retirement. (Though he also lived in some other rooms over the street for a while.) This was sufficiently recent that we still had the same "scout" (cleaner/caretaker) who had been there at the time, and who was keen to remind us of this at every possible opportunity. I suppose there was an element of "I used to look after a famous and distinguished professor and now I have to look after you slobbish nonentities."

We had another polyglot at Merton, who was not mentioned on the list at #3's reference, namely JR Lucas, the philosopher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John<u>Lucas</u>(philosopher) It was said he claimed to be able to speak about 25 languages at least conversationally, and to be able to translate rather more. There was a rumour going the rounds current that someone arranged to have a Hungarian phone him up and see if he could indeed, as claimed, speak enough Hungarian to answer the phone to one, Hungarian being one of the more unlikely languages he claimed to be able to speak. It was said that confirmation had been obtained in that manner. JR Lucas was a very rare beast in the academic world those days, being one of the last examples of an eminent academic who never took a doctorate. He was notably eccentric. His gown had gone green with mould or something growing on it, and had tears mended with duct tape, and he called his dog Quinquagessima. Though we weren't short of eccentrics: the late John Barton, Professor of Roman Law, was often seen walking around college a large and colourful parrot chained to a leather pad on his shoulder.

Hey, I'm fluent in 40 lanauges too, then. I speak 2010's English, 2000's English, 1990's English, 1980's English, ...

You can be similarly multiligual with different dialects of a single language. Anyone fluent in Serbian is also fluent in Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin,

#6 -- I was talking about that recently. There must be people whose grandfather spoke one language (Serbo-Croatian), whose father spoke two (Serbian and Croatian), and who themselves speak four (add Bosnian and Montenegrin), without anybody going to the trouble of studying anything.

#7 You don't have to go back several generations. Until the early 1990s, the people in Yugoslavia were all speaking Serbo-Croatian.

#7 You don't have to go back several generations. Until the early 1990s, the people in Yugoslavia were all speaking Serbo-Croatian.

If I were Slovenian, Macedonian, or an Albanian-speaking Kosovar I might be extremely surprised to hear that.

You would probably be bilingual with Slovenian, Macedonian or Albanian plus Serbo-Croatian.

Claims such as this irritate me because they're too loose too often. They seem to go from "speaks X-number of languages" to "knows X-number of languages" to "is/was familiar with X-number of languages" all too easily.

How do you actually define "to know a language"? What are the criteria? Being "familiar with" a language doesn't necessarily mean you can speak it, does it? (Or express complex ideas in writing if the target language is no longer spoken?)

I mean, who tests these claims? How are they verified?

(Or express complex ideas in writing if the target language is no longer spoken?)

That shouldn't really be the standard for Old English and other entirely dead languages. There's no point learning active OE; who would you write OE to? Being able to read it should be enough to support a claim to knowledge of it.

Here's where we differ. If you claim to have mastered a language you should be abe to produce discourse in it, not merely be able to decipher it.

With dead languages, since no one now speaks them, we're forced to rely on the written word exclusively. Fair enough, but we shouldn't simply accept the ability to make sense of texts as proof of having mastered a dead language. If people claim to have mastered Latin, is it not reasonable to expect them to be able to, for instance, write an original letter in clear, correct Latin?

It's the difference between passive knowledge and active knowledge that concerns me. To lay claim to having mastered a language, you must be capable of more than merely comprehending it.

I'm also unimpressed by people's claims to understand things said to them in obscure languages as the basis of claims to "speak" those languages. There's a huge gulf between getting the gist of what's being said to one, or even understanfding it very well, and being able to generate original discourse in the target language.

The same goes for taking brief phone calls - most likely consisting of greetings brief Q and A - as proof of having mastered a language (although I know from personal experience how much harder it is to communicate effectively on the phone unless you're really comfortable in a foreign language).

All in all, I think we should hold people who make these claims of superpolyglotism to a much higher standard of proof. I'm reminded of Rodney Dangerfield's line about how he used to be so fat at one time that when he had a shoeshine he just had to take the guy's word for it. It seems to me too many people are too ready to take other people's word for having mastered dozens of languages. How about we maintain some some healthy scepticism until and unless they really prove their mastery by being put through some tough public testing?

If people claim to have mastered Latin, is it not reasonable to expect them to be able to, for instance, write an original letter in clear, correct Latin?

You've just introduced the term "mastered." OP had used the terms "learned" and "was familiar with."

I think there is no doubt that Tolkien had learned Old English. If you have any doubt of that, I refer you to his well-known essay Beowulf: the monsters and the critics.

I did that deliberately, since the main thrust of my argument is that speaks+, +knows+, +learned+ and +is/was familiar with should not all be lumped together to form one great big long litany of languages that the person in question has supposedly acquired. At what point, for example, does "he knows" take over from "he learned"?

People who proclaim themselves as true polyglots should be put to the test before their claims are accepted. A mere familiarity with a language doesn't entitle one to claim to "have" that language. Partial or superficial knowledge of a language may fool the naive and ignorant, but they should not be put on a par with mastery of a language, which I suspect is the case with many of these language lists.

I believe the more languages they claim to "know" (or whatever word short of "mastered" they choose to use) the more pressure they put on themselves to provide proof. Let native speakers be the judges of their claims when it comes to current languages, and for dead languages let recognized authorities see whether such people's claims can stand up to scrutiny.

I don't know who you're arguing with, or who you're arguing about, Lonelier_Planet. I don't know how many languages Tolkien claimed to have mastered, or learned, or become familiar with.

I am sure that he knew Old English in the sense in which scholars of Old English, which is perhaps the relevant speech community, use the phrase "to know Old English."

OP asked "I wonder what 'familiar' means".

That's the crux of the matter.

We're being asked to take people's word for their linguistic accomplishments, and we're being asked to accept "knows", "learned" and "is/was familiar with" as being interchangeable.

I have been insisting all along that only proven communicative ability in any given language should be the criterion for including a language or languages on anyone's "My/His/Her Languages" list.

And for some reason you've kept trying to reduce the discussion to whether or not I accept that the Lord of the Rings guy was an ace when it came to Old English. That's a side issue. I've been trying - apparently without success - to advance the idea that the list of polyglots and their languages that one other poster provided may seem impressive, but without some kind of firm evidence of their ability to use those languages we should always keep our admiration on hold. On hold until the proof is in, anyway.

We're being asked to take people's word for their linguistic accomplishments

No we're not. Not in this thread anyway. Tolkien hasn't been quoted once, and he is the subject of this thread, as you'll see if you look at the subject line.

And I was referring to the list of polyglots (like the guy who claimed to speak 100 languages) in the link provided by #3.

I have my doubts about some of those claims, VinnyD, I have my doubts. A lot of claims, a dearth of proof. I can't help but wonder if some of those polyglots were like a guy I heard about who told everyone he played a lot of instruments, including the clarinet. The problem was, nobody ever+ heard him play any tune on the clarinet but +Send in The Clowns. A great tune, but was that enough proof to qualify him as a clarinetist?

I hadn't looked at toot's link, Lonelier_Planet.

There is certainly a difference between someone who can play Send in the Clowns on the clarinet and someone like me who would know which end of a clarinet to put in my mouth but no more than that. It's a difference that we might want to describe in words sometime. We might decide that a way to describe the difference was to say that I can't play the clarinet while the SitCs guy can. It doesn't really seem unreasonable to me.