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The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual. Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it
by silverpepsi 3y ago
The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual.
Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it.
And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any capacity to acquire those languages (producing output in real time involves none of the mental calculus done when grammar is consciously processed as a set of rules, except for a little editing after the fact in the "monitor" part of the brain, you can only fluently produce grammar, words, and prosody that have been acquired.).
So to me the claim is out there.
- eru 3y ago> The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual. Who is that?
- jacquesm 3y agoI suspect they meant Chomsky.
- eru 3y agoI thought so as well, but a quick web search suggests that Noam Chomsky speaks English and Hebrew. (It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.) See also eg https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_languages_does_chomsky_speak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_langua...
- jacquesm 3y agoThe only other candidate then would be Pinker, but I'm not sure if he's monolingual either.
- eru 3y agoThe Internet suggests he speaks English and French, which seems plausible since he lived in Montreal.
- silverpepsi 3y agoI found this and I don't think there's any good proof he is bilingual...I will not set the bar so high for a coworker or friend but as a linguist I don't buy "used to be but I forgot it" "He was once fluent in Hebrew, but told an Israeli journalist that he was now rusty, and conducted the interview in English."