Polyglot Meme

The new Facebook profile prominently features a place to list the languages you know. I never know what to write in such cases. Should I include only languages I can converse in completely fluently? Ones that I can read but not really speak – or speak but not really read? Ones that are rather rusty? Ones that I’m in the process of learning?

The matter of degrees of literacy and fluency is familiar to those who study the ancient world of Jesus and the earliest Christians. Questions like “How many people could read?” or “Would Jews from Nazareth have known Greek?” are impossible to answer, but even if we could answer them it would almost certainly require a spectrum of degrees and nuances, from “Yes, fluently” to “Enough to trade” to “A little” to “No” as well as every possible answer in between.

And so I’ve decided to start a meme, asking those tagged to list every language that they have made some sort of concerted effort to learn, even if they didn’t get beyond the first lesson or so, or even if they are still learning it. No need to specify the degree of fluency in the blog post – if readers are curious how much Swahili you know, they can ask.

Here’s my list:

Albanian
Arabic (Eastern, Egyptian, Modern Standard)
Aramaic/Mandaic/Syriac
English
Coptic
Farsi (Persian)
French
German
Greek (Koine, Modern)
Hebrew (Biblical, Modern)
Hindi
Hungarian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Latvian
Lithuanian
Mandarin Chinese
Romanian
Russian
Serbo-Croat
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Tamil

I tag George, Steve Caruso, Mike Aubrey, Jim Getz, Chris Heard, Chris Brady, and anyone who reads this and thinks it would be fun to join in.

Feel free to comment on the glaring omissions from my list. I can hear the comments now: “You’ve never even tried to learn Klingon?!?!”