I heard a guy interviewed who claimed to speak about 100. He said it got easier after the first 30.
There was a linguist named Kenneth Pike (now deceased, I believe) who put on a language-learning demo at the Modern Language Association every year. I didn’t witness it, but it was described to me that he sat at a table with a native speaker of a language he didn’t know and there were a few natural artifacts on the table: an apple, a stick, a stone, that sort of thing. After a half hour he was carrying on a simple conversation with him.
My coworker doesn’t rank anywhere near the polyglots from wikipedia, but I’m still very impressed by him.
I work at a translation company, and he has done QA work for us (so works at a professional level) in:
French
Italian
German
Spanish
Portuguese
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Norwegian
Finnish
Greek
Russian
Turkish
plus he is a native English speaker.
I believe he may also speak a few, like Latin and Welsh, that we don’t handle so I don’t know about.
[QUOTE=diggleblop]
A language in the sense of what I’m asking is this, if one group of people speak to each other and understand each other, that’s a language. If they speak the same language to a group of people living say…30 miles away from them and that group doesn’t understand them, then that must mean that group speaks a different language.
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The problem with this is that there aren’t nice sharp geographical boundaries between languages. People living near the border between two countries speaking different languages often understand the people living a few miles away on the other side of the border quite well. If A and B can understand each other, and B and C can also understand each other, it does not imply that A could understand C. The differences add up and eventually you have an undeniably different language, but A would say B spoke the same language as him, and B would say the same of C.
[QUOTE=diggleblop]
A language in the sense of what I’m asking is this, if one group of people speak to each other and understand each other, that’s a language. If they speak the same language to a group of people living say…30 miles away from them and that group doesn’t understand them, then that must mean that group speaks a different language.
If the actual words don’t make sense to another group living in the same area, then it’s is considered a different language. Dialect doesn’t count. What I mean by that is, British and American people both speak English and a lot of words may be altered, but it’s still English.
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According to your first paragraph, Jamaican and Floridian appear to be different languages. OTOH, Spanish and Italian aren’t, but I wouldn’t say that where any Italians or Hispanics other than yours truly can hear it.
