language masters (NY Times)

[Stephen DeGiulio]

    Hey Greg, not so fast. Often words are found in many, sometimes
scores, of languages, with variations in phonology which are
transparent to someone familiar with the phonology of the languages
involved (which sound systems themselves come in related families).
So your million seperate lexical items becomes a very much smaller
set of items which appear differently in different language contexts.
(The same applies to the morphology of said lexemes, and to syntax.)
    How about meanings? In fluent conversation the meanings one gives
to words, expressions, and grammatical structures can often be made
clear by context, non-verbal cues, redundancies, and feedback from
pointed questioning--even if those meanings differ from the most
usual meanings of native, monolingual speakers; understanding is even
easier--to one possessed of a sensitive, well informed linguistic
intuition, a flexible imagination, and a minimum of correct data.
     Sure, one lifetime is not enough to fully master a single
language, but that's not what is in question here. Perhaps the
ability to speak many languages is little more than an occasionally
useful stunt (or even the outcome of a relatively benign compulsion),
but I don't see any reason to doubt that it is possible. (Compare to
linguists, and others, who know a heck of a lot about certain
languages without being able to speak or understand them.)

*******************
Greg Thomson wrote:

So then, he learned his 93 languages by the age of 40? O.K. Assuming he
started at age zero, and managed to be lingual in each language with a
modest 10,000 item vocabulary, then in 40 years, he acquired 930,000
non-native lexical items, or about 64 per day. Etc. etc. I wonder how he
kept his 94 mental lexicons active enough so that they could function
well in comprehension and production as he continued knowing all those
languages for the next fifty years. (-;


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   Stephen De Giulio             New Mexico State University
   1215 Vermont Avenue                         at Alamogordo
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