The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages
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The article talks of him like he’s a child. Bouncing around at all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you, who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather ‘round everyone!
Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be normal.
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.“
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art
It looks spammy otherwise.
Perhaps the line means that people who read a lot are judgemental and likely to hate others. If that's the case, I don't really buy it, because people who truly read a lot are probably too busy reading to hate people not in the books.
Of this lyric “ And I'm no different, I live in conflict and contradiction But it can be so beautiful When I don't reject what lies within It's beautiful the way agony connects us to the living I think of the world when I hurt, and keep on existing in the Now”
Am I on the right path by thinking it talks on the strange symmetry in the hearts of man? (fearing the darkness and scraping away at the edges with fire - Rei Ayanami) waves and troughs, prickles and goo, anxiety is thinking one of them will win (Alan watts). This dastardly act I do only for good reason! (Someone’s ladder?) A seemingly endless cycle of justification?
Give unto Caesar, which bokonon paraphrased as Caesar doesn’t know what’s really going on.
The vine produces fruit and the wild boar has bad breath.
Is it the dangers of being locked in idealised or normative interpretations and advocacy?
I don’t think it’s what it’s trying to talk about but I’ll mention on talk of those best able to murder, those best at warfare, they may preach peace because it is they that do the killing, someone else decides the victim. Your poem maybe is of them trying to keep their monopoly.
And so it is that your poem talks of the other, beware them, do not believe their lies (write it on your Polaroid for when you forget later - memento) but it is really talking of yourself, you aren’t better than them, when you are sure of yourself you have lost, when you are unsure of yourself you have lost. If your aren’t to be fooled by others you need only stop fooling yourself? (Which maybe can’t be done haha)
Not sure how it fits in but I’m also compelled to add from a beautiful mind: you watched a mugging John, that’s weird.
Let me save you said the monkey, putting the fish safely up the tree.
Also, beware them all you like, your still stuck with them.
Gosh, actually I’m lost. I grapple with this a long time, inwards spirals infinitely, outside doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s best not to get involved. Don’t mention that you know Spanish, make friends with strangers at the bus stop.
I think they presented it honestly without being derisive.
The hidden motivation behind this is fear of other people and the fear of evil which for most people has all but conquered their love of reality, truth, and so on.
If one does have other genuine interests and pursuits (for example foreign languages) then the task of appearing normal is harder. So the implication that he isn't smart enough to be normal is in this sense correct.
Which by the by suggests that motivation is the key to learning, not attention control, repetition, particular books, starting young or the other usual suspects and methods. These are downstream from motivation.
Or do you really think that one of the most powerful countries in the world is “normally” somehow full of ignorants? I’ll answer - not any more than where you are from.
And I'm not saying that the US has a higher percentage of ignorants than other countries, but being one of the most powerful countries in the world, they are also one of the most (if not the most) self-centered. So, not a higher percentage of ignorance in general, but maybe a higher percentage of ignorance of other languages, cultures etc.
Is it. I was curious, and the first google hit I came across was:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-dive...
1. Chad - 0.8514
2. Cameroon - 0.8426
3. Nigeria - 0.8306
4. Togo - 0.8118
5. Congo (Dem. Republic of) - 0.8111
For example, in terms of language, Nigeria has 525 languages:
“Index value is the probability of two people selected at random from any one country speaking the same language. 1.0 is most diverse, 0.0 is least diverse.”
I leave the reader to judge for themselves whether that is a good measure to judge diversity as being discussed here or not.
In California, my social circle is mostly PhDs. These are phenomenally smart people. You go to a JPL party and the average IQ has to be 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean. There are a lot of rooms where I'm by far the dumbest person. But most people I know are either unilingual or bilingual. Even in Southern California, a majority of people have sub-conversational levels of Spanish. I know very few people who are conversationally trilingual. Where I grew up in Canada, E/F bilingualism was somewhat common but very, very, very few people spoke a third language and most people had halting French. I'm in Ireland right now and native-born Irish speak English and a culpa focal of Irish, and that's about it.
What this says to me is that it's pretty unlikely that a country's tendency towards multilingualism is meaningfully correlated with education or economic status. And while I know the idea of measuring "intelligence" is completely fraught, I can at least say it seems unlikely that a random sample of people in one place are as intelligent as JPL people.
All this to say that in all three of the anglosphere countries I've lived in, people seem to have a mental block on the idea that a second language is essential, or that a third or fourth language are even feasible. Someone who fluently speaks four languages is considered a polyglot, a freakshow, some kind of Beautiful Mind. But then you go to Netherlands or Switzerland or Morocco and it's normal. And the reason for this isn't obvious to me: it doesn't seem to relate to income, education, it doesn't seem to obviously correlate with intelligence. It seems to just reflect some kind of cultural premium placed on language acquisition. I'd love to read more about why this is.
I think this becomes more acute when one's profession is specialized and the professional circle doesn't value multilingualism, especially because of how much harder it is to become exposed to the genre/technical writing and jargon of your professional language in another language, as opposed to mundane professions.
One thing would be a talk by Temple Grandin, who had her brain scanned in some way (I’m not sure between mri cat ekg eeg etc but I think fmri). Iirc and very loose summary it showed a mid section of her brain to be different, and therefore an explanation of the symptoms of her autism was her brain rewireing around this difference by relying more on other parts. I think she does compare it to others who have suffered brain trauma to see how the brain can do amazing things, as well as there might be some physical thing to autism. So I’d say rather interesting and a reason to bother with those kinds of things. Otoh have you ever been so different that people want to study you? An autist can miss this and think they’ve made a new friend but the crushing realisation is that it’s a bit more like a freak show.
And so, mentioned at the bottom of the article is that he shows signs of autism. If you assume that to be true and read between the lines of his history, throw in a leap here and there, in an attempt to understand why, it can look as though he learnt the languages because he decided to and did, but why is that he wanted to connect with someone, anyone, from childhood being a constant outsider. Like Forrest Gump learning ping pong. Like Forrest Gump only ever being treated like a person from damaged people. It also explains why he didn’t want attention, associating all attention with bad, since early childhood. Iirc, to be specific, he found novelty in how different words sound in his mouth and enjoys seeing people be happy that he can speak to them. Those people being outsiders as well, from a certain perspective. I feel as though these are all quite common autistic experiences. Another one is being paraded around as a novelty by people only long enough until you annoy them and then you are tossed aside again, not knowing why, todays puppy being tomorrows embarrassment/responsibility. Which talks of another autistic trait: be useful.
So please forgive me for portraying that I am mocking the event, you are correct in that I may have been too sensitive, but I feel as though the writer writes off as him just being brown, something quite different: the lengths some autists, and generally, some outsiders, will go to to fit in or to avoid or cope with the anxiety of not fitting in. To have a normal experience in a normal way.
So to stress again, I appreciate the story and everyone involved. I’m aware there’s a lot of contention and hot button issues nearby but I’d like to avoid it. I’ll leave you with a scene from almost famous: https://youtu.be/WzY2pWrXB_0
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1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³
2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time.
3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵
4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian).
5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.
> Her English is accentless
I don't mean to pick on you, but every English speaker has an accent. It might be some kind of American accent, but it's still an accent.
I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well.
It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).
In order to reach these crazy high number of languages you will have to make compromises.
You are underestimating the capability of some people to memorize certain information. Sometimes it is called "eidetic" memory. The best chess players just don't forget any chess position they ever see. Similar reports in music. Most of them are useless when memorizing any other form of "data". The carpet cleaner in question probably has that facility for words, phonemes and grammar. He just doesn't forget that stuff.
Giant caudate nucleus at work?
Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.
As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation.
As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...)
Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one.
Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
> As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time.
That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese.
Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
Here's the opening of a Latin poem:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato Pyrrha sub antro?
What many slender you boy in rose
soak liquid press odor
pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave?
This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other.
Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what:
> [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis.
> [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”)
Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
Learning vocabulary is also not "the easiest" part of learning a language either, it's one of the most fundamental step of learning a language, which take a massive amount of time. If time can be shelved here (and indeed is in-between Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-Korean, etc. even Vietnamese to Japanese) it can be reinvested elsewhere. Heck, I've seen a Taiwanese girl getting her JLPT N3 after one semester of Japanese study just thanks to the shared vocabulary and characters.
>Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language.
I thought trolling was against the rules here?
[1]松下達彦・陳夢夏・王雪竹・陳林柯（2020）「日中対照漢字語データベースの開発と応用」『日本語教育』177、pp.62-76.
Strongly disagree. Memorizing vocabulary is a huge barrier to learning a foreign language. You need something like 5000 words just to have basic conversational competency, and far more to understand texts about a domain, or slang, or literature.
First, I disagree that vocabulary is the part that causes by far the least problems, instead in general my approach to learning any language is to first focus on learning the vocabulary. And to counter your latin example, when I was a child, I studied Latin, after my first 6 months of latin, I went to live in Spain for 5 months, when I came back latin was significantly easier than it was before. I could understand a lot more than I could before. The only reason for this was that I know could speak Spanish and could use that to guess words.
Of course this works a lot better on writings that are not poems, in general poems like your example are more difficult to understand without knowing the cultural context around them. If you want to really illustrate your point, try with a text that's not a poem and you will see that knowing the vocabulary does indeed significantly help.
Second, reading is absolutely an essential part of knowing a language. At this point, I really don't even know how to answer to this besides asking for clarification why you would come to this conclusion? I'll just say that I would have loved having the significant advantage Chinese students have when it comes to reading Japanese.
Finally, I was going to make the same points historia_novae about how many words really do have the exact same meaning in written form between Japanese and Chinese. But he expressed that better than I could.
The argument you're making would be the same as this: "It's easier for an English-speaker to learn Finnish because it uses the Latin alphabet". The only reason that helps is that you don't also have to learn to decipher a new set of squiggles. It doesn't actually help you understand spoken language or speak it.
1: Mandarin is a Sino-Tibetan language, while Japanese is a Japonic language. These two language families are not related in any ancestral way known to modern linguistics.
In the same way, English is a West Germanic language whereas French is a Romance language, this doesn't however stop the significant import of French vocabulary in English which likewise is a result of history and of the conquest of England by William the conqueror. This is a bit different because both English and French are the same branch of a bigger family Indo-European, so those two languages are more similar to each other in term of grammar than Chinese and Japanese but the point about vocabulary I think still illustrates the fact that besides vocabulary inherited by a common language, there can also be vocabulary imported due to historical influences between neighbours. In the case of Japanese it's significant because of their adoption of the writing system and the amount of vocabulary that was imported that way..
Another example of what I'm talking about is Korean. There's some dispute about the language family of Korean with some saying that it's also a japonic language, some saying it's a language isolate. However no one would claim that Korean is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Yet, it's well known that 70-80% of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin. This is the same mechanism.
On the other hand, due to both languages being from different language families, the grammar of Japanese and Chinese are totally different and unrelated.
Even if you are an illiterate Chinese speaker, you can make up Japanese vocabulary by converting Chinese words under these patterns, it may be hit or miss, but shared vocabulary makes it easier to learn. Add some basic grammar and you can start communicating pretty quickly. I know plenty of Chinese speakers that learned Japanese very quickly, but failed to learn English well.
Other factors that make language learning quicker: access to materials (lots of Chinese speakers consume Japanese content, many classes available, there are a lot more books to learn Japanese for Chinese speakers), access to native speakers (close to Japanese, many exchanges students), friends and relatives that learned the language (if they can do it I can do it too), economic incentives, etc.
Korean speakers also have an easy time with Japanese vs other languages even though they are not related. Shared Chinese vocabulary, simple phonology and similar grammar patterns.
Similarly, although Northern Saami and Norwegian are not genetically related, there is so much borrowing of terms (also same alphabet) due to shared geography/history that it's easier for a speaker of Norwegian to learn Northern Saami than it is to learn Kildin Saami (more borrowings from Russian, also different alphabet, while very related to Northern Saami) or Korean/Nahuatl/… (just as genetically unrelated, completely different Sprachbund)
This is old-school trolling.
The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!
And now I know why he's not working another job. Depression is the life killer.
Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
That'd make it hard for him to join a uni or find ways to make use of his abilities.
I wonder if he'd be more happy, working as a language teacher assistant (why assistant? see the 1st sentence above), for all languages they teach at some university nearby :-)
and then i realized i still have no intuition as to the answer.
just it's a great question. glad you wrote it down.
But linguists have approached this question from time to time! The main stumbling block is highly literate people are inclined to think of writing as language but it's not, quite. You can have multiple writing systems for the same spoken language, or be fluent but illiterate. But you can't comprehend a writing system for a language you can't speak, barring disability.
So programming languages do have grammar, but not the other components of a language. Idioms in programming are a metaphor referencing linguistic idioms but structurally they aren't the same. Programming languages are more similar to writing systems, and a lot of linguistics findings do apply to them when taken in that context.
You can play around with this idea if you want. Try to convey meaning to someone using only a programming language and nothing else. This is tricky because they embed our other writing systems, so you need to be careful not to accidentally convey meaning with eg variable names. Might be best to use something like brainfuck or piet that prevents that entirely. If it's a language in the "human languages" sense, you'll be able to convey any arbitrary meaning to another person who knows that programming language, even if you don't share a spoken one.
What ends up happening is you can only do this if you reference a shared spoken language. So you can warp a PL into a writing system, but you can't use it alone to communicate.
My question was "would natural hyperpolyglot be better capable of learning/using programming languages", and I don't think any of what you said tells us one way or the other. Yes, the things being expressed with programming languages are different from the things being expressed with natural languages, but they are both designed for expression and communicating meaning. I'd love to see studies on whether there's any relationship between being able to easily pick up and retain human languages, and the same for programming languages.
edit: note, that I'm not even asking if someone with an aptitude for human languages would be good at using programming languages. Obviously the logical components, required for doing a lot of things with them, are a completely separate skill.
I'm only wondering if he'd have an aptitude for learning a language, in terms of syntax, grammar, standard library and associated methods, idioms.
I am not aware of strong evidence for linguistic relatively. Only some light stuff like some two words rhyme in a language so they are more likely paired in music and poetry than in other languages where they don't rhyme.
It is much more plausible that human understanding of the world has shaped language. We can expand our vocabulary for our needs. Skiers of any language likely know more words for snow than speakers of their same language who only want to hang out on the beach.
At least that's what a linguist suggested to me when I lamented my inability to learn some foreign languages as well as peers.
Example: a circuit diagram. You have a transistor and some other components, and if you know the language you can recognise it as an emitter follower. It's a very concrete and clear mapping.
There aren't many things you can do with a transistor. When you've learned them all, that's basically it.
Human languages are much bigger. If you ignore the alphabet level and start with words, there are thousands of symbols (tens of thousands for advanced users). And most of language is about implication and context.
If a partner says "What time will you be back tonight?" that can mean anything from "Because my car is still in the garage, can I borrow your car?" to "Are you still having an affair?" to "Will you make it in time for curfew?"
In most conversations and a lot of writing, the words are hints, not explicit mappings to defined meanings. You can parse an immediate meaning without knowing the context, but not the full meaning.
So it's a much harder problem. You have to learn basic grammar and vocab for tens of thousands of symbols, then learn standard basic exchanges in social situations, then special forms, idioms and social register, then implication and subtext.
I'm afraid I may sound stupid now. Why did you have to add the "barring disability" part?
He might be making different sounds but the meaning is the same, with some culture specific exceptions.
Programming is very little like communicating and it's a lot more like engineering.
The guy might struggle with picking up programming to begin with though, it is indeed a completely different thing from human language.
The skills involved in picking up a natural language are going out and schmoozing with people who speak that language.
This is not actually a skill set that people who are good at picking up programming languages are known for.
If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
But there is a study that showed, that talent for languages matters more for programming skills than talent for mathematics.
Did that study do anything beyond intro programming materials? Did that study really show anything?
He probably doesn't have the skills for a traditional translating job, just as the average bilingual person hasn't. There are jobs for "unskilled" translators, not sure how much and in what contexts. Not sure if there is a job description out there for "hyper-polyglot genius". Niche-skill at best, unfortunately.
Maybe as a tester for multilingual software?