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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3839 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 19, 2024

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I have personally met a bishop who spoke, fluently, in English, French, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Kazakh, and Italian at a minimum, based solely off his life story and conversational abilities that I personally saw, and could also read and write very well in Latin. John Paul II was notoriously able to speak 14 languages, and even if we limit it to fluency in distinct languages I'd be able to count 5 off this link(https://www.quora.com/How-many-languages-did-Pope-John-Paul-II-speak-fluently).

Now it's quite likely that they learn these things instead of, say, math, and Catholic bishops have a very high average IQ so can probably have a higher cognitive load than average. But it does probably demonstrate that knowing many, many languages to a high degree of fluency is entirely possible.

How could you really actually know though? Unless you are better than they are or are assessing with translated recordings in a testing environment? I'm with bonsaii here, I think it is BS.

I heard him speak English and French fluently; fluency in Italian would be a prerequisite of his level of influence within the church; his life would be extremely implausible if he didn’t speak Lithuanian, German, Russian, and Kazakh all extremely well and over a broad range of topics. I suppose it’s possible that his literacy in Latin used a dictionary or other translation assistance, but I heard attestations that he didn’t need it.

As far as JPII goes, I have no direct knowledge, but the consensus seems to be that he really was fluent in eight languages, although granted that’s partly by counting Spanish and Portuguese separately.

Bully for him. But I just don't think people can actually keep that many disparate grammar models rattling around in the old braincase at the same time +vocab. Maybe he WAS ok at some of those languages 30 years ago when he spoke them every day or something, but there is no way for someone to be "fluent" in that many at the same time.

I just spent a bit of time googling about and there seems to be a general consensus that most youtube polyglots are faking it for the most part. Other more honest polyglots know a core of 2, or rarely 3 "unique" languages and are at a conversational in a few more, they still need a few weeks to refresh their skills before traveling to another country. There is no doubt about it, trying to maintain many languages runs into maintenance problems well before you hit fluency in 8 languages as disparate as those listed. It just isn't possible in the way some people claim it is.

I suppose it depends to some extent what fluency is, exactly. I'd be very impressed by anyone not a native speaker knowing English as well as I do (and, to be honest, a bit impressed even by native speakers when they know sufficiently obscure words).

I would imagine generating the right word on the spot would be significantly harder than grammar—native speakers can fail to do so, on occasion.

That people would know at most 2 or 3 languages well seems unlikely to me. My guess would be that there would be hundreds of millions of people who are natively bilingual, so surely higher numbers have occurred a bunch of times.

Eh, I know a number of Lutheran clergy who speak multiple languages fluently and additionally have a reading and sometimes writing knowledge of several more. It’s not at all uncommon to come across pastors who speak fluent English, German, and one or more of Spanish, Italian, one of the Scandinavian languages, Afrikaans, Russian, Japanese, etc. These same guys can generally also read Koine Greek without much difficulty, maybe ancient Hebrew (if they retained it after graduating from the seminary), and frequently also Latin.

The ministry is one of the few professions that still heavily emphasizes the learning of foreign languages, so it’s not altogether surprising that it attracts people with a propensity in that direction.

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