From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 05:00:15 MST
Oh, now this is an interesting question.
> Does anyone know about the maximum number of languages that can be learnt?
I think it is in the vicinity of 5-6 (with some degree of fluency).
The correct source for this I think would be the Guinness Book of
World Records (though one would need to carefully constrain based
on fluency). To be able to say hello in 60 languages is easy --
to be able to converse in them is much more difficult.
To be "conversational" one generally needs several thousand words
(its much more than hundreds).
> Secondarily, does anyone know what the maximum number of computer languages
> able to be learnt by one person might be?
It depends on what you mean by "learnt" but if you include the assembler
languages (many of which may be obsolete due to the termination of the
production of the chips), I've probably learnt a dozen or more. I would
be relatively comfortable today with PERL, C, Fortran, PDP-10 and PDP-11
assembler. If pressed I could probably deal with IBM-360 Assembler,
NS-16000 Assembler, IBM Series-1 assembler and Intel-8086 Assembler
as well as some uncommon languages such as Bliss-10, Bliss-11 and PPL
(polymorphic programming language). I could probably make a stab at
BASIC, LISP and perhaps SMALLTALK as well.
The principles behind most of these languages with the exception of
LISP and SMALLTALK are pretty much the same so relearning a new
vocabulary isn't too difficult. The primary difference between
natural languages and computer languages is that the "natural" vocabulary
is much larger. There are a few "natural" languages that have
a very different syntax -- but they are a minority. So the difference
between learning a computer language and a natural language is really
a question of the required size of the vocabulary. My gut level
feel is that the computer languages are about an order of magnitude
smaller than natural languages in this requirement.
Hope that helps.
Robert
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