Learning Foreign Languages

dzheremi said:

Yep! That's a common phenomenon. At least it was working when you needed it to.



British-American linguist and University of Edinburgh lecturer Geoffrey K. Pullum published a book of collected essays in 1991 called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, the title essay of which covered this exact situation. It turns out the 'answer' to the question of how many words the Inuit have for snow (which I won't spoil here -- primarily because I don't know where my copy of this book is right now, and I can't remember off the top of my head...) requires a dive into the thorny issue of what exactly qualifies as a 'word', cross-linguistically. This is a question that does not have a universally-accepted, pat answer, and many books and articles have been written about it. Suffice it to say that the number of words for snow in Inuit languages is far, far fewer than what people who do not speak an Inuit language tend to imagine, and that the popularity of this idea hides a somewhat less numerically-impressive (but still very interesting) reality. If I recall correctly, it is shown in the essay that there are more individual words for types of snow in English than in Inuit languages, again owing to the difference between how English and Inuit words 'work'.

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Ophiolite said:

The curse of being a native English speaker is that there is less need to learn another language. Despite this I have made multiple attempts to do so. All have failed. I am curious as to what languages other members may speak, including those for whom English is a second, third, or even fourth language. For the record, here are the languages I have attempted to learn (and failed), in no particular order: French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin.
These failures frustrate me, as I think being monolingual restricts the freedom of our thought, channeling it into a single perspective. To those who are fluent in multiple languages, do you find that aspect to be an advantage?

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dzheremi said:

Yep! That's a common phenomenon. At least it was working when you needed it to.



British-American linguist and University of Edinburgh lecturer Geoffrey K. Pullum published a book of collected essays in 1991 called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, the title essay of which covered this exact situation. It turns out the 'answer' to the question of how many words the Inuit have for snow (which I won't spoil here -- primarily because I don't know where my copy of this book is right now, and I can't remember off the top of my head...) requires a dive into the thorny issue of what exactly qualifies as a 'word', cross-linguistically. This is a question that does not have a universally-accepted, pat answer, and many books and articles have been written about it. Suffice it to say that the number of words for snow in Inuit languages is far, far fewer than what people who do not speak an Inuit language tend to imagine, and that the popularity of this idea hides a somewhat less numerically-impressive (but still very interesting) reality. If I recall correctly, it is shown in the essay that there are more individual words for types of snow in English than in Inuit languages, again owing to the difference between how English and Inuit words 'work'.

Click to expand...