Some people are capable of speaking so many languages that it is almost impossible to believe. How they do it, and what other people can learn from polyglots.
In Berlin, sitting on a sun-drenched balcony, Tim Keely and Daniel Kraza engage in a verbal firefight. First, like bullets, German words fly out, then into Hindi, and then Nepalese, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Thai ... In the course of a conversation, the languages spontaneously flow into one another. These two went through a total of 20 different languages or so!
Returning from the balcony to the hall, I find there several small groups, the participants of which are competing in tongue twisters. Others, split in threes, prepare for a rapid-fire game in which you need to simultaneously translate from two languages. It all looks like a guaranteed recipe for a migraine, but those present are absolutely unperturbed.
Learning even one foreign language can be challenging. In Berlin, I found myself at the Rally of Polyglots, which brought together 350 people who speak many languages, and such unusual ones as, for example, the language of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man, Klingon (the language of aliens from the TV series "Star Trek"), Sami - the language of the nomadic people. reindeer herders of Scandinavia. There are surprisingly many “hyperglots” among the audience, who, like Keely and Kraza, can speak at least 10 languages.
One of the most prominent linguists I have met here is Richard Simcote. He leads the polyglot team at a company called eModeration, which deals with multilingual management. social networks, and uses almost 30 languages himself.
With my humble knowledge of Italian and rudimentary Danish, I feel somewhat out of place among the hyperglots. But, as folk wisdom says, you need to learn from the best - and here I am to try to find out their secrets.
Dementia cure
Considering all the complex tasks for the brain that the learning of a foreign language poses for us, it is not surprising that most of us consider this a matter that requires significant dedication. A person has many different memory systems, and each of them is involved in learning another language.
There is the so-called procedural memory - this is the subtle programming of muscles to improve pronunciation. There is a declarative memory, i.e. the ability to memorize facts (for example, keep at least 10,000 words in your head if you want to get close to a native speaker's fluency, let alone grammar). Moreover, if you don't want to sound like a stuttering robot, these words and phrases should be on the tip of your tongue in a split second. This means that they must be programmed in "explicit" and "implicit" memory. The first stores information that we deliberately tried to remember, the second contains things that were deposited unconsciously, involuntarily.
We try to memorize single words or phrases, but this is not the main thingSuch mental exercises, however, bear abundant fruits; it is claimed to be the best of them all available ways brain training. Numerous studies have shown that multilingualism improves attention and memory, and provides a "cognitive reserve" that delays the development of dementia - senile dementia.
In a study of the experience of immigrants, Ellen Białystok of York University in Canada found that those who spoke two languages had a five-year delay in being diagnosed with dementia. People who knew three languages were diagnosed 6.4 years later than "monolignvs". At the same time, people who were fluent in four or more languages could boast nine additional years of healthy consciousness.
Learning a new language at an older age is easier than we imagine.
These long-term benefits stand in stark contrast to the failure of most commercial brain training games that can be downloaded from the Internet. By and large, they are not capable of providing long-term improvement in memory and attention.
Until recently, many neuroscientists assumed that in most cases we are too old to achieve fluency in a new language. According to the “critical period hypothesis,” there is a narrow time window in childhood when we are able to learn all the nuances of a new language. However, Białystok, on the basis of her research, claims that this is somewhat exaggerated: instead of a sharp decline, as she found out, over the years there is a very slight weakening of our abilities.
Indeed, many of those "hyperglots" I met in Berlin did not master foreign languages. childhood... Keely grew up in Florida, at school he was in close contact with children for whom Spanish was their mother tongue. As a child, he tuned his radio to foreign radio stations, although he could not understand a word.
As an adult, he began to travel the world. First he went to Colombia, where he studied French, German and Portuguese. Then he moved to Switzerland, then to Eastern Europe, after which he went to Japan. He now speaks fluently at least 20 languages, and he learned almost all of them as an adult.
The question arises as to how polyglots master so many new languages, and whether all others can at least try to follow their example. It is true, of course, that they can still be far more motivated than most people. Many polyglots are, like Keely, avid travelers who, as they move from country to country, learn new languages along the way. Sometimes the alternative is either swim out or drown.
Even with the most powerful incentives, many of us struggle to speak another language. Tim Keely, who is now writing a book on "the social, psychological and emotional factors of multilingualism," is skeptical that the point is in the initial level of intelligence.
"Cultural chameleons"
Instead of getting hung up on the level of intelligence, he says, we should look into the depths of our own individuality. According to Keely's theory, when we start learning a new language, it leads to the fact that we seem to re-develop a sense of our own personality. It is not for nothing that the best linguists adopt a new identity so easily.
Psychologists have long known that the words we utter leave an imprint on our personality. According to established clichés, French makes you more romantic and Italian more passionate. But in fact, each language begins to associate with cultural norms that influence the way you behave. It could be something as simple as you can choose to be openly gullible or quietly contemplative. Importantly, according to various studies, multilingual people behave differently depending on which language they are speaking at that moment.
Different languages bring up different memories from your life. The writer Vladimir Nabokov found this out when he was working on his autobiography. Nabokov, whose native language was Russian, began writing memoirs in his second language, English. It went with "painful work": his "memory was tuned to one mode - musically unspoken Russian - and a different way was imposed on it, English and detailed," Nabokov wrote in the preface to the Russian edition of the book "Other Shores".
When the memoirs were finally published, he decided to translate them into the language of his childhood, but as soon as Russian words began to flow, he found that the memories began to be saturated with new details, and blank spots began to fill in and acquire form and content.
In her book, The Bilingual Mind, she explores many of these effects. As for Nabokov, one might think that each of his two entities - Russian and English - had a slightly different past.
Resisting the process of re-identifying yourself is holding you back from learning another language properly, says Tim Keely, now a professor of intercultural management at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka, Japan. Not so long ago, he conducted a study among native speakers. Chinese students of Japanese, during which he considered the "transparency" or "transparency" of their egos. He asked students to rate such statements: "It is easy for me to put myself in the shoes of another person and imagine how he is feeling" or "I can impress people." Then he asked questions such as "can the respondent change his opinion so that it suits those around him." As he predicted, people who performed well on these metrics were faster at fluency in the new language.
How can this be explained? It is well known that if you identify with someone, chances are you will imitate them. In the process of imitation, the degree of language acquisition increases with little or no effort. That said, the acquired identity and associated memories can help you avoid confusing the target language with your native language by creating neural barriers between them.
And in fact, maybe this is what explains the ease with which Keely switches to any of the 20 languages he knows.
Language is theater
Of all the polyglots, Michael Levi Harris is the best person to demonstrate this principle in action. Harris, who has trained as an actor, also has an advanced knowledge of 10 languages and understands 12 more languages quite well. From time to time this creates certain difficulties for him. One day he came across an advertisement on the Internet about a meeting of the Maltese. Going to the address where he expected to meet a group of people from Malta, he found himself in a room full of middle-aged ladies with white domestic dogs - Maltese lapdogs. This adventure he reproduced in the recently released short film "Hyperglot".
It's not just about how much time you devote to learning and how much you speak a foreign language.
When we meet him at a cafe near the Guildhall School of Music and Dramatic Art in London, he effortlessly transitions to a very sophisticated English pronunciation(received pronunciation or RP - "standard English" without regional or social accents), despite the fact that he is a native of New York. At the same time, his demeanor changes, he simply dissolves into a new personality. “I am not at all trying to consciously change my character or my own personality. It happens on its own, but I know that suddenly I am different. "
It is also important, says Harris, that anyone can learn to pull on themselves the skin of another culture, and he is ready to give a few tips, based on his acting experience, where to start.
An important trick, he says, is to try to imitate without thinking about how the word is spelled.
He advises paying close attention to things like facial expressions, as they can be key to making sounds. If, for example, you pout your lips slightly while speaking, you will sound a little more French.
Finally, he says, you need to try to overcome the embarrassment of making "strange" sounds, such as throat sounds. Arabic... “You should understand that there is nothing“ foreign ”in them for us. For example, when you are disgusted, you can make a burp sound? Once you acknowledge this and allow your subconscious mind to do the same in speech, you will be able to make an unusual sound. "
It may sound silly, but the point is to help you overcome your natural inhibitions. “It's about mastering the language - it's the same thing that actors have to do to make the audience believe that the words they are speaking are their own. When you are fluent in words, you can speak with more confidence, and then people will have confidence in you. "
However, most agree that you shouldn't be too ambitious, especially in the beginning.
According to these attitudes, you should practice a little and often. At least 15 minutes four times a day.
So said Alex Rawlings, who, together with Richard Simcott, has developed a series of master classes for polyglots in which they teach participants their techniques. Even if you're too busy or tired for serious pursuits, act out a dialogue or listen to a popular song in a foreign language and that alone will be helpful, Simcott says.
In the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, you can easily come to the idea that there is no need to strain. In fact, until I met the "hyperglots" face to face, I kept trying to figure out if their passion was worth the effort. Perhaps, I thought, it's all about an innate, though not always deserved gift.
Yet the hyperglots I met showed genuine enthusiasm for the fantastic benefits that can only be achieved by immersion in other languages. Among them is the opportunity to find new friends and establish contacts, even despite high intercultural barriers.
This is how Harris describes, for example, his life in Dubai. “As a Jew living in the Middle East, it was difficult for me. But, as it turned out, one of my best friends is from Lebanon, ”he says. - And when I left, he told me: when we first met, I did not think that we would become friends. Now you are leaving, and I am desperate. "
Judith Mayer, the organizer of a polyglot gathering in Berlin, told me that she saw Russians and Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians talking to each other. "By studying language after language, you discover new worlds."
Who among the polyglots around the world knows (or knew) the most languages?
According to the academic dictionary of foreign words, POLYGLOT (from the Greek polyglottos - "multilingual") is a person who speaks many languages.
Legend has it that Buddha spoke one and a half hundred languages, and Mohammed knew all the languages of the world. The most famous polyglot of the past, whose abilities are attested quite reliably, lived in the last century - the curator of the Vatican library, Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774 - 1849)
Mezzofanti was legendary during his lifetime. Besides the main European languages, he knew Estonian, Latvian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and many others. It is believed that he translated from one hundred and fourteen languages and seventy-two "dialects", as well as from several dozen dialects. He spoke sixty languages fluently, wrote poetry and epigrams in almost fifty. At the same time, the cardinal never traveled outside Italy and studied this unthinkable number of languages on his own.
It's hard to believe in such miracles. Moreover, the Guinness Book of Records claims that Mezzofanti was fluent in only twenty-six or twenty-seven languages.
Among foreign linguists, the biggest polyglot was apparently Rasmus Christian Rusk, professor at the University of Copenhagen. He spoke two hundred and thirty languages and compiled dictionaries and grammars of several dozen of them.
In Great Britain, the consummate polyglot today can be considered the journalist Harold Williams, who knows eighty languages. Interestingly, Harold learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and German when he was only eleven years old.
A new volume of the Guinness Book of Records has just been released on English language... The most important polyglot on the planet in 1997 is recognized as forty-year-old Ziyad Fawzi, a Brazilian of Lebanese descent who speaks fifty-eight languages. Despite his outstanding abilities, Senor Fawzi is a man of the highest degree modest. Teaches modestly foreign languages at the University of São Paulo. Translates modestly. Any of fifty-eight languages. And he wants to translate from a hundred. And - from any to any. He is now preparing textbooks for publication in several languages, using his method of rapid assimilation.
The most amazing of our polyglots is Willy Melnikova. Its story is simple and incredible at the same time. The guy was sent to the Afghan war. Further, as in the movie "The Diamond Arm": fell, woke up - a plaster cast ... Willie came out of a coma as a different person. But instead of diamonds, he got something more expensive - unlimited access to the world linguistic "Internet". Since then, Willie has studied several languages every year. Although "studying" is not quite the right word to describe what is happening. Eyewitnesses say: "The languages seem to come to him." Willie looks attentively at a person speaking an unfamiliar dialect, listens to his speech, then as if tunes in, trying different registers, and suddenly, like a receiver, "catches the wave" and gives out a clear speech without interference ...
How many languages Melnikov actually knows is unknown. Every time an experiment is carried out to study his method, Willie meets with a native speaker of another unique dialect. After the conversation, his personal "linguistic" asset is replenished with a new language ... "This is no longer a method, but something beyond," the scientists say.
In general, he says that he knows "only" 100. But he is being modest. In the course of the conversation, we calculated that Sergey Anatolyevich is the head of the department of the Russian University for the Humanities, Doctor of Philology, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy natural sciences- is familiar with no less than 400 languages, taking into account the ancients and languages of small endangered peoples. It only takes him three weeks to learn the language. Among colleagues, this 43-year-old professor has a reputation as a "walking encyclopedia". But at the same time, he is distinguished by ... a bad memory.
The most difficult question for me is: "How many languages do you know?" Because it is impossible to answer it exactly. Even 10 languages cannot be known equally. You may know 500 - 600 words and be perfectly able to communicate in the country. For example, I know English very well, because I have to travel and talk all the time. But I think that my German is better in passive. And you can speak badly, but read well. For example, I read ancient Chinese classics better than most Chinese. Or you may not read or speak, but know the structure, grammar. I cannot speak Negidal or Nanai, but I remember their vocabulary well. Many languages become passive, but then, if necessary, they return: I went to Holland and quickly restored the Dutch language. Therefore, if we count all the languages with which I am familiar at different levels of knowledge, then there are at least 400 of them. But I actively speak only 20.
Do you feel your uniqueness?
- No, I know a lot of people who already know several dozen languages. For example, 80-year-old Australian professor Stephen Wurm knows more languages than me. And speaks fluently at thirty.
- Collecting languages - for the sake of sports interest?
- We must distinguish between linguists and polyglots. Polyglots are people who specialize in absorbing a colossal number of languages. And if you are engaged in science, then language is not an end in itself, but a working tool. My main activity is comparison language families between themselves. To do this, it is not necessary to speak every language, but you need to keep in your memory colossal information about roots, grammar, and the origin of words.
Are you still learning languages?
- In 1993, there was an expedition to the Yenisei, they studied the Ket language - an endangered one, 200 people speak it. I had to teach him. But I learned the bulk of the languages at school and university. From the 5th grade for five years at the Olympiads at Moscow State University, I was a prize-winner: I could write on a proposal in 15 Indo-European languages. At the university, he taught mainly oriental.
POLYGLOTS ARE BORN.
Are they born with the ability for languages or is this achieved through the efforts of constant training?
- I thought about it a lot. Naturally, this is heredity: I have a lot of polyglots in my family. My father was a well-known translator, edited Doctor Zhivago and knew several dozen languages. My elder brother, a philosopher, is also a great polyglot. The elder sister is a translator. My son, a student, knows at least a hundred languages. The only family member who is not into languages is the youngest son, but he is a good programmer.
- But how is a person able to store such an array of information in memory?
- And I, paradoxically, have a very bad memory: I do not remember phone numbers, addresses, I can never find a second time the place where I have already been. My first language, German, was very difficult for me. I spent a lot of energy just memorizing words. In my pockets I always carried cards with the words - on one side in German, on the other - in Russian, so that on the way to the bus I could check myself. And by the end of school, I trained my memory.
I remember that in the first year of the university we were on an expedition to Sakhalin and studied the Nivkh language there, which is also dying out. I went there without preliminary preparation and just like that, on a dare, I learned the Nivkh dictionary. Not all, of course, 30,000 words, but most.
- In general, how much time do you need to learn a language?
Three weeks. Although the eastern ones, of course, are much harder. It took a year and a half to learn Japanese. I taught him at the university for a whole year, the grades were excellent, but one day I picked up a Japanese newspaper and realized that I could not read anything. I got angry - and learned it on my own over the summer.
- Do you have your own learning system?
- I am skeptical about all systems. I just take the textbook and teach from start to finish. It takes about two weeks. Then - in different ways. You can tell yourself that you have become familiar with this language and if it becomes necessary, you will take it from the shelf and activate it. There were many such languages in my practice. If the language is necessary and interesting, then you need to read the literature further. I have never used linguaphone courses. To speak well, you need a native speaker. And the best thing is to go to the country and live there for a year.
What ancient languages do you know?
- Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, ancient Japanese, Hurrian language, in which in the II century BC. e. spoke in ancient Anatolia.
- And how do you manage to remember dead languages - there is no one to talk to?
- I'm reading. There are 2-3 texts left from the Hurrian. There are languages from which two or three dozen words have survived.
HOW ADAM AND EVE SPEAKED.
You are looking for the proto-language of humanity. Do you think that once all the people of the world spoke the same language?
- We are going to discover and prove - all languages were one, and then disintegrated in the thirtieth-twentieth century BC.
Language is a means of communication and is transmitted as an information code from generation to generation, therefore errors and interferences are bound to accumulate in it. We teach our children without noticing that they already speak a little bit in another language. In their speech there are more subtle differences from the speech of the elders. Language changes inevitably. It takes 100-200 years - this is a completely different language. If the speakers of the same language once went in different directions, then in a thousand years there will be two different languages.
And we have to find out if 6,000 modern languages, including dialects, starting point? We are gradually moving from modern languages to ancient ones. It's like linguistic paleontology - step by step we reconstruct sounds and words, approaching proto-languages. And now the stage has come when it is possible to bring together several large language families, of which there are now about ten in the world. And then the task is to restore the proto-languages of these macrofamilies and see if they can be brought together and reconstructed. common language, which Adam and Eve may have spoken.
ONLY CAN WANT IN RUSSIA.
- Which language is the most difficult and which is the easiest?
- The grammar is easier in English, Chinese. I learned Esperanto in an hour and a half. Difficult to study - Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. But the most Difficult language on earth - Abkhazian. Russian - medium. It is difficult for foreigners to assimilate only because of the complex alternation of consonants (hand-pen) and stress.
- Are many languages dying?
- All languages in the Urals and beyond the Urals, Nivkh and Ket are from the Yenisei family. V North America are dying out by the dozen. Terrible process.
- What is your attitude to profanity? Is it rubbish?
- These words are no different from other words. The comparative linguist is used to dealing with the names of the genitals in any language. English expressions significantly poorer than the Russians. Japanese is much less littered with swear words: it is more polite people.
Sergey Anatolyevich Starostin (March 24, 1953, Moscow - September 30, 2005, Moscow) - an outstanding Russian linguist, polyglot, specialist in the field of comparative studies, oriental studies, Caucasian studies and Indo-European studies. The son of the writer, translator, polyglot Anatoly Starostin, brother of the philosopher and historian of science Boris Starostin. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the Department of Literature and Language (Linguistics). Head of the Center for Comparative Studies of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State Humanitarian University, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Honorary Doctor of Leiden University (Netherlands).
In general, he says that he knows "only" 100. But he is being modest. In the course of the conversation, we calculated that Sergei Anatolyevich - head of the department of the Russian University for the Humanities, Doctor of Philology, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences - is familiar with at least 400 languages, taking into account the ancients and languages of small endangered peoples. It only takes him three weeks to learn the language. Among colleagues, this 43-year-old professor has a reputation as a "walking encyclopedia". But at the same time, he is distinguished by ... a bad memory.
The most difficult question for me is: "How many languages do you know?" Because it is impossible to answer it exactly. Even 10 languages cannot be known equally. You may know 500 - 600 words and be perfectly able to communicate in the country. For example, I know English very well, because I have to travel and talk all the time. But I think that my German is better in passive. And you can speak badly, but read well. For example, I read ancient Chinese classics better than most Chinese. Or you may not read or speak, but know the structure, grammar. I cannot speak Negidal or Nanai, but I remember their vocabulary well. Many languages become passive, but then, if necessary, they return: I went to Holland and quickly restored the Dutch language. Therefore, if we count all the languages with which I am familiar at different levels of knowledge, then there are at least 400 of them. But I actively speak only 20.
Do you feel your uniqueness?
- No, I know a lot of people who already know several dozen languages. For example, 80-year-old Australian professor Stephen Wurm knows more languages than me. And speaks fluently at thirty.
- Collecting languages - for the sake of sports interest?
- We must distinguish between linguists and polyglots. Polyglots are people who specialize in absorbing a colossal number of languages. And if you are engaged in science, then language is not an end in itself, but a working tool. My main activity is comparing language families with each other. To do this, it is not necessary to speak every language, but you need to keep in your memory colossal information about roots, grammar, and the origin of words.
Are you still learning languages?
- In 1993, there was an expedition to the Yenisei, they studied the Ket language - an endangered one, 200 people speak it. I had to teach him. But I learned the bulk of the languages at school and university. From the 5th grade for five years at the Olympiads at Moscow State University, I was a prize-winner: I could write on a proposal in 15 Indo-European languages. At the university, he taught mainly oriental.
POLYGLOTS ARE BORN.
Are they born with the ability for languages or is this achieved through the efforts of constant training?
- I thought about it a lot. Naturally, this is heredity: I have a lot of polyglots in my family. My father was a well-known translator, edited Doctor Zhivago and knew several dozen languages. My elder brother, a philosopher, is also a great polyglot. The elder sister is a translator. My son, a student, knows at least a hundred languages. The only family member who is not into languages is the youngest son, but he is a good programmer.
- But how is a person able to store such an array of information in memory?
- And I, paradoxically, have a very bad memory: I do not remember phone numbers, addresses, I can never find a second time the place where I have already been. My first language, German, was very difficult for me. I spent a lot of energy just memorizing words. In my pockets I always carried cards with the words - on one side in German, on the other - in Russian, so that on the way to the bus I could check myself. And by the end of school, I trained my memory.
I remember that in the first year of the university we were on an expedition to Sakhalin and studied the Nivkh language there, which is also dying out. I went there without preliminary preparation and just like that, on a dare, I learned the Nivkh dictionary. Not all, of course, 30,000 words, but most.
- In general, how much time do you need to learn a language?
Three weeks. Although the eastern ones, of course, are much harder. It took a year and a half to learn Japanese. I taught him at the university for a whole year, the grades were excellent, but one day I picked up a Japanese newspaper and realized that I could not read anything. I got angry - and learned it on my own over the summer.
- Do you have your own learning system?
- I am skeptical about all systems. I just take the textbook and teach from start to finish. It takes about two weeks. Then - in different ways. You can tell yourself that you have become familiar with this language and if it becomes necessary, you will take it from the shelf and activate it. There were many such languages in my practice. If the language is necessary and interesting, then you need to read the literature further. I have never used linguaphone courses. To speak well, you need a native speaker. And the best thing is to go to the country and live there for a year.
What ancient languages do you know?
- Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit, ancient Japanese, Hurrian language, in which in the II century BC. e. spoke in ancient Anatolia.
- And how do you manage to remember dead languages - there is no one to talk to?
- I'm reading. There are 2-3 texts left from the Hurrian. There are languages from which two or three dozen words have survived.
HOW ADAM AND EVE SPEAKED.
You are looking for the proto-language of humanity. Do you think that once all the people of the world spoke the same language?
- We are going to discover and prove - all languages were one, and then disintegrated in the thirtieth-twentieth century BC.
Language is a means of communication and is transmitted as an information code from generation to generation, therefore errors and interferences are bound to accumulate in it. We teach our children without noticing that they already speak a little bit in another language. In their speech there are more subtle differences from the speech of the elders. Language changes inevitably. It takes 100-200 years - this is a completely different language. If the speakers of the same language once went in different directions, then in a thousand years two different languages will appear.
And we have to find out - did 6,000 modern languages, including dialects, have a starting point? We are gradually moving from modern languages to ancient ones. It's like linguistic paleontology - step by step we reconstruct sounds and words, approaching proto-languages. And now the stage has come when it is possible to bring together several large language families, of which there are now about ten in the world. And then the task is to restore the proto-languages of these macrofamilies and see if it is possible to bring them together and reconstruct a single language that Adam and Eve may have spoken.
ONLY CAN WANT IN RUSSIA.
Which language is the most difficult and which is the easiest?
- The grammar is easier in English, Chinese. I learned Esperanto in an hour and a half. Difficult to study - Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. But the most difficult language on earth is Abkhazian. Russian - medium. It is difficult for foreigners to assimilate only because of the complex alternation of consonants (hand-pen) and stress.
- Are many languages dying?
- All languages in the Urals and beyond the Urals, Nivkh and Ket are from the Yenisei family. In North America, they are dying out by the dozen. Terrible process.
- What is your attitude to profanity? Is it rubbish?
- These words are no different from other words. The comparative linguist is used to dealing with the names of the genitals in any language. English expressions are significantly poorer than Russian ones. Japanese is much less littered with swear words: it is more polite people.
Sergey Anatolyevich Starostin (March 24, 1953, Moscow - September 30, 2005, Moscow) - an outstanding Russian linguist, polyglot, specialist in the field of comparative studies, oriental studies, Caucasian studies and Indo-European studies. The son of the writer, translator, polyglot Anatoly Starostin, brother of the philosopher and historian of science Boris Starostin. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the Department of Literature and Language (Linguistics). Head of the Center for Comparative Studies of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State Humanitarian University, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Honorary Doctor of Leiden University (Netherlands).
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