That’s okay – thread discussions ought to be free and range where they will; It’s hard to rein them in.
If you’re going to cite a glancing mention in Wikipedia rather than actual dictionaries, which all define polyglot as one speaking “several” languages, then I’ll counter with another Wiki cite/site.
C3P0 is a polyglot. People with two languages are not. Might as well say that people who know two subjects are polymaths.
True, as a discriptivist I would agree with that two-language definition if it were becoming widespread. But I couldn’t find any evidence of that.
Back to the OP. The need for multiple languages used to be standard among merchants, traders, and travelers. Even in America, New York city alone had dozens of non-English newspapers at the height of immigration and multiple fluencies made life a lot easier. Why became so weird to be a polyglot that it became a trope for eccentricity so soon after that is far more mysterious than why it disappeared when the US became mostly a monoculture after WWII.
ISTM the eccentric literary characters weren’t the ones who spoke several languages well.
They were the ones who couldn’t complete a sentence or three without using multiple of their languages when the same ideas could be conveyed equally well in the local main language. Which in the literature we’re talking about is almost always English, and one particular country’s English. Be that USA, UK, Australia, etc.
How many examples are there of that? I count less than a handful of them here. All the others are about regular polyglots. That even that handful exist is what I’m wondering about.
OK, then define several.
Definition 2 a: more than one
Definition 2 b: more than two but fewer than many
Definition 2 c: chiefly dialectal : being a great many
As dictionaries are usually structured, a comes before b in relevance, b comes before c. Pick your choice. I claim that bilinguals are polyglots. But as English is not my mother tongue, I can only refer to other dictionaries in other languages. Spanish, for instance:
https://dle.rae.es/políglota
adj. Dicho de una persona: Que habla varias lenguas. U. t. c. s.
Sin.: polígloto.
Ant.: monolingüe.
Ant. means antonym, which has the opposite meaning. Monolingual means one who speaks one language. The opposite of that is one that speaks more than one language, that is two or more. If the usage in modern English has evolved to mean otherwise, so be it. But the etymology is what it is. Mono: one. Poly: more than one.
Same in German.
But as a descriptivist myself, this is not a hill I am willing to die on. Interesting that the feeling of you native English speakers has evolved in that direction. I take note. But I will not change my usage of the word.
We use the word “bilingual” about a thousand times more often than we do “polyglot.” When describing someone who speaks three or more languages we will more often give a number or even list them all before we will use the word “polyglot”.
Yep.
Smells to me like a 1950s linguistic professional or literary noun or adjective.
Not like a term to be used in even high register normal spoken or even written discourse. Two American science professors discussing a colleague might well say “Professor Smith is multilingual”. They’d almost certainly never say “Professor Smith is polyglot” or “Professor Smith is a polyglot.”
IOW, “polyglot” is a word educated Americans know, but do not use. It’s literary / peoetic, not functional.
“Merriam-Webster dictionaries primarily order definitions chronologically, placing the oldest known meaning of a word first and proceeding to the most recent.”
If we’re going to talk about polyglots who are in the habit of showing their proficiency by switching all the time between languages, which is a fair and interesting specification of this thread, this is something natural, to a certain extent. Cervaise already mentioned how in his experience Luxembourg young people do so.
If you often speak in a different language (or maybe also are otherwise exposed) you will often find that you want to express a certain concept which you think of in another language but can’t immediately think of the equivalent in the language you are speaking right now. There are plenty of examples of this in fiction and in practice. Nowadays lots of Dutch people, especially in certain businesses, sprinkle their conversation with lots of English words while a century ago German and French were common (as witnessed by books written around that time). I presume it is the same everywhere. Now if you are in an environment where you regularly need to converse in other languages, you are bound to mix them up quickly in your conversation. The fictional examples given were precisely about such environments.
Since multinational environments have become increasingly English-centric, the practice of rapid switching between three or more languages is dying out, and therefore there are also less real-life examples to inspire fictional characters.
That’s the boring explanation.
A certain je ne sais quoi, if you will.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Touché.