“The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/multilingual-hyperpolyglot-brain-languages/
I wonder how prevalent autism is among hyperpolyglots.
Languages spoken:
Here’s a video from his YouTube channel.
I will continue reading the article later, but so far it did remind me of an earlier article I read. It identified the jobs of people with insanely high IQ scores.
While one would expect those people to be top-level engineers, scientists, professors, etc., these hyper intelligent people are often seen delivering mail, cleaning and waiting tables. Jobs that allow them to get out of their own heads, rather than force them into their heads more. It is not the achievements and recognition that they seek, it is mental quiet.
The human mind is fascinating
He himself said 8 languages fluently when asked, that 24 is just some sort of way to make the title seem more catchy; especially, once you look at what kind of level is counted towards those 24 languages.
In the article it says, that his dad was from the States and his mom was from Mexico and that is how he started out with English [N] and Spanish [N]. Getting from Spanish to Portuguese [1] is really just a matter of adding some sort of Russian/Italian accent to it and done. Okay, I’m kidding… but it’s really not a problem for a Spanish speaker to read a text in Portuguese and get the gist of it. Very little effort required to learn Portuguese if you’re a native Spanish speaker.
The one thing that strikes me as a little strange is that he’s “fluent” in 3 Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian [2]); however, with the exception of “conversational” Italian, he’s only on an “intermediate” level in Catalan and French. On a CEFR scale that kind of “intermediate” would be considered A1/A2 though.
Also, if we can list Czech [3] and Slovak [3] as two distinct languages, we should consider replacing English with American and British instead. Here the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for those now familiar with these two languages:
Czech
Všichni lidé se rodí svobodní a rovní v důstojnosti i právech. Jsou obdařeni rozumem a svědomím a mají se k sobě chovat v duchu bratrství.Slovak
Všetci ľudia sa rodia slobodní a rovní v dôstojnosti aj právach. Sú obdarení rozumom a svedomím a majú sa k sebe správať v duchu bratstva.English
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
All in all, it’s a bilingual person who’s learned 5 languages (2 Romance and 3 Slavic). Portuguese being the most obvious Romance language coming from Spanish with 89% lexical similarity. Romanian having a lot of Slavic influence is the other obvious choice for a Romance language.
Knowing 3 Romance languages you can definitely make out enough of the other Romance languages to put them unter what is labeled “Intermediate” above. Same for the Slavic languages and the same point as above could be made for Serbo-Croatian being more of a dialect continuum rather than two separate languages as was already the case with Czech–Slovak. Again, you have to wonder why his Polish is only “Intermediate”.
I believe hyper- in this context is defined as 11 or more (correct me if I’m wrong) and I’m not even sure he he qualifies. That is counting only Fluent and Conversational from the list above… because the rest sounds like DuoLingo (Intermediate), having read a tourist guide vocabulary list (Basic), or even only having knowledge of the existence of a language (Some familiarity).
But I just that’s a matter of personal opinion, I’d start counting a language once you get to B2 or above towards your polyglot-ness. Maybe there are different ways of counting… especially if you consider ASL a language.
Does it look like he’s interested in languages? Sure. Is it impressive? Well, not more than others that do the same. Is it as “remarkable” as the article claims? I doubt it.
