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Polyglots vs Linguists vs Philologists

Posted by on Jul 8th, 2010 | no comments home title

A lot of people are confused by the term "linguist". A linguist is a scientist of linguistics, not somebody who can speak many languages. I know many linguistics professors who are not sufficiently bilingual, but they can still call themselves linguists. Speaking and studying are two different things. Multilingual or polyglots speak many languages. And this ability is not related to the science of linguistics, although I'm sure linguists could study or analyze polyglots. Philology was replaced by linguistics and there aren't really any practitioners of it today, except Professor Arguelles. Professor Arguelles is not a polyglot unless he has the ability to speak the languages he studies.

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