From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 17:54:06 MST
Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
> > Does anyone know about the maximum number of languages that can be learnt?
>
> I seem to remember that the record is on the order of 20 or 30 or
> so. Some guy at a UN translation office. The main problem being
> to get enough practice to stay fluent in them.
That might feasible. The figure I recall seeing was with respect to
a prodigy in the late 1800's that had mastered all of the major European
languages and several Asian languages as well.
As I type this, I decided to get off my lazy butt (similar to Spike's
presumably) and see if I could look it up. My 1995 edition of "The
Guinness Book of World Records" contains 5 pages about "Languages"
which alone could probably make for a very interesting game of "Trivial
Pursuit".
For example, it is estimated that in New Guinea there are an estimated
869 languages.
Now, with respect to the question at hand:
"The world's greatest linquist is believed to have been Dr. Harold Williams
of New Zealand (1876-1928), a journalist. He was reputed to speak 58
languages and many dialects fluently."
"The greatest living linquist is Ziad Fazah (Brazil; b 10 Jul 1954 [so
he should now be about 48]) who speaks and writes 58 languages..."
"Alexander Schwartz of New York City *worked* with 31 languages as a
translator for the United Nations between 1962 and 1986."
So there you have it. These numbers are surprisingly high (to me)
so these people must have had really exceptional verbal skills.
> As many as you can find time to actually work with, I guess. For
> practical purposes, computer languages are an entirely different
> thing than human languages. Personally, I don't think I process
> code like language at all, but hey, I might be wrong, given our
> species' absurdly limited ability of introspection.
The process of writing code may be different -- its a logical
creative process that I suspect is not too different from writing
a book. But the process of knowing the vocabulary of what you
can write and the syntax of how you must put things together,
I suspect makes use of the language centers and genes.
But natural languages are *much* more complex than programming languages.
Programming languages use from a few dozen to a few hundred terms.
English has ~600,000 words and ~400,000 technical terms, of which
Shakespere used ~33,000. So we are talking a difference of approximately
2 orders of magnitude in complexity. No wonder computers have a problem
with speech recognition.
Kind of amazing what you can learn from reading only a couple of pages
of the right source.
Robert
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