The greatest polyglot you personally know

Shatin   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 06:19 GMT
Many of us have read about all those wonderful polyglots who can speak numerous languages. I often wonder how true those stories are. What I hope is that I can hear from you polyglots who you actually personally know.

As for me, the greatest polyglot I know is French lady of Italian descent. She grew up speaking both French and Italian. She learned English in school and then went on to do her university studies in Japan.

While 4 languages may not seem like a lot, the remarkable thing is she speaks them all extremely well. Naturally she speaks French and Italian like a native. Her English is also excellent. I am sure many people would think that she's a native English speaker. I don't know how good her Japanese is but I am sure she at least speaks the language fluently.
Shatin   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 06:24 GMT
Btw, if you feel that the greatest polyglot you know is yourself, feel free to blow your own horn!
Brennus   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 06:30 GMT
The greatest polyglot I knew was Victor Barki, a Sephardic Jewish man, originally from the Isle of Rhodes who died just last year (2004). He spoke seven languages: Hebrew, Greek, Ladino, Spanish, Italian, French and English. I still remember him speaking fluent French with a Morrocan Jewish lady one night in a restaurant and he could always converse with Greek and Spanish speaking cooks in the restaurant. He was an accountant by trade since it is hard to make a living from languages, unfortunately.
Brennus   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 06:32 GMT
Morrocan > Moroccan
Deborah   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 06:41 GMT
I met a woman at a Persian restaurant who was speaking Farsi, but she definitely had a Northern European look, very pale blonde hair, blue eyes and light skin. Turns out she was Polish, and her husband was Persian. Her first languages were Polish (native), Russian (because she had to learn it, and she'd worked as a Polish-Russian interpreter), and English (the first language she chose to learn). French, Spanish, Italian and German followed, and finally Farsi, because of her husband. She claimed to be fluent in all the above; she certainly spoke excellent English, albeit with a slight Polish accent. I listened to her speaking with the Persians at the table, and she seemed to be keeping up with them and, to my untrained ears, sounded like them.

She said she had some proficiency in Arabic and had just started studying Japanese. She told me that once you have 4-5 languages under your belt, it gets very easy to pick up others. I would say she was 50-ish.
mjd   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:03 GMT
One of my professors back in college....She grew up in Switzerland, so German was her native language and, of course, she knew French. Her father was Hungarian, so she knew Hungarian. She was a Classics professor, so right there she knew Ancient Greek (perhaps modern as well..I'm not sure) and Latin.

I remember her reading a text that was written in very early Latin...she translated it effortlessly into English at the drop of a dime, as if she were reading an advertisement in the newspaper.
Travis   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:48 GMT
The most as polyglots go that I have known are a number of Belgium IRC users who in the very least know Dutch, French, English, and German, and I wouldn't be wholly surprised if some of them knew a few more languages as well. It's somewhat embarrassing when some individuals are switching back and forth between English, Dutch, and French, and apparently fluent in all of them, and all one can do (other than speak English) is relatively slowly speak in German (and then, only recently).
greg   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:49 GMT
A Polish girl I met year-lights ago : Polish, Russian, German, French, English and she wanted to start Italian and Spanish.
Travis   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:50 GMT
Whoops, that should have been "Belgian IRC users" in my previous post.
Travis   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:53 GMT
Oh, actually, make that this one kid I knew in high school who spoke Polish, Russian (both natively), English, Spanish, French, and probably German if I recall correctly.
Damian   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 07:59 GMT
So far I've only knowingly met one person who fluently spoke several Languages (apart from English):

French, German, Italian, Spanish and Greek.

He is an English guy btw.
Kirk   Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 08:31 GMT
One of my current professors speaks 12 languages fluently (and she's not one to toot her own horn...we had to get it out of her). She's originally Russian (so is native in Russian of course), and speaks English, French, Spanish, Malagasi, and Korean, among some others I can't remember right now. I'm sure she speaks each one to varying degrees but at least her English is excellent...she has a slight accent but she's almost at native level in terms of competence. Sometimes her accent even sounds surprisingly American for several consecutive words at a time. Amazing woman.

The other people I've met who can even come close to this are many of the Assyrian-Americans (yes, Assyrians...not Syrians...even tho Assyria hasn't been a nation for a long time they still identify with Assyria) in my hometown in California. Many were born in Iran or Iraq, and natively spoke Assyrian (I think it's related to Aramaic but isn't Aramaic) as well as Farsi and Arabic. Many studied French and/or English and/or German as children so are very competent in those as well, especially since many have a history of living in different European countries before they settled down in the US. After arriving in the US many also picked up some Spanish if they hadn't already studied it, as it is useful in my hometown (which is 1/3 Hispanic), and really once you've learned that many languages the next one isn't that hard to conquer. It wasn't uncommon for my American-born Assyrian friends to have parents who fluently spoke 7 or 8 languages as a result of the high number of native and learned languages they had acquired in their lifetime. They are the largest group of people I've known to be consistently extreme polyglots.
Sanja   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 17:04 GMT
"The most as polyglots go that I have known are a number of Belgian IRC users who in the very least know Dutch, French, English, and German, and I wouldn't be wholly surprised if some of them knew a few more languages as well."

I have used those IRC channels quite a lot as well and my experience is pretty much the same. I have to say that the typical picture looked something like this: Most people from Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg could fluently speak and write 4 or even 5 languages and their English was almost always perfect, whereas many (if not most) native English speakers couldn't spell their own language correctly. That must be pretty embarrassing.
Steve K   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 23:03 GMT
I knew a man of Lativan origin in Vancouver here who spoke 40 odd languages and was a court translator in most of them. I speak 9 languages very comfortably and he was good in all nine, and that includes Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese. You could hear me at my website but to give the URL here would just give all the "free internet purists" a chance to howl.

I met a Japanese student in the early sixties, in a bar in Vienna. He was deaf mute. He could carry on simultaneious converstations in writing in 13 languages. Yes he got the "l" and "r" right!!!!
Steve K   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 23:13 GMT
Pardon my spelling mistakes. We really should have an edit function here or a spell check function.