tractor wrote:Cavesa wrote:tractor wrote:Cainntear wrote:As yet, I have never met anyone outside of the internet language learner sphere who uses "polyglot" the way Simcott does.
Is the word "polyglot" used much at all outside of the internet language learner sphere?
Yes, just a bit differently. A bit less overall, and not sure whether better or worse. More vaguely, more as if talking about mythical beings. But sometimes also about people with ridiculously low amount of languages for the term (such as 4). There is no consistency that I could observe.
The reason I asked, was because I haven't really been part of an "offline" language learning community since I left university 20 years ago. As far as I can remember, polyglots weren't a frequent topic of discussion, but that was of course long before the advent of Youtube polyglots. My friends, family and colleagues don't talk much about polyglots either, and if the do, they'll probably not say "polyglot", but rather refer to them as somebody who "speaks many languages".
Ah well... there's the difference between active and passive vocabulary.
I asked several people what the word "polyglot" means and they all said basically "someone who speaks lots of languages". I think most people who're not involved in the "nu polyglottery" world would question whether the YouTube "language tourists*" are polyglots at all.
* HTLAL terminology. For those who weren't about back then, we played around with different ways to categorise different levels of interest in languages. I always tended to make a distinction between "day job" languages and "hobby" languages (I was studying a part-time degree in languages at the time, and frequently listening to the first few lessons of Pimsleur courses borrowed from the library) but a lot of other people talked about "language tourism" as a metaphor, because you'd visit and explore; you'd hang about for a short period of time, then go back to your normal life and not bother about the language much again.