Alexander Arguelles: Polyglot

This man serves as a motivation to anyone who dabbles in the learning of more than one foreign language. I myself have found myself frustrated at times with the language learning process, but have come to realize that I am as much learning the language as I am learning how to learn in general. He describes in his biography his early frustrations with French, from which after 7 years of study he was placed only into a second-year sequence during his undergraduate studies. The many different ways he describes his work ethic, the time he put(s) in to language study and the pure & honest motivation to decode the many languages he has come to master is simply honorable; he now has (at least) reading capability in (from what I can gather) over 40 languages.

One of his professors forced him to drop Persian during his graduate studies because his explanation for taking the class was simply to 'learn as many languages as he could'. This professor also added that these types of remarks are the things that make other scholars not take one seriously. I loved that Arguelles called this one of his greatest what if moments in his life, and what he had written just before that was so simple yet so profound, I reread it 6 to 7 times, asking myself different questions each time I ran through the passage:

"....languages are ultimately not very important - they are just tools for getting at material, and what really matters is the justification for the methodological theory with which you analyze that material and the originality of the hermeneutic argument that you build upon that theory."

The questions that ran thru my head: Why do I want to know a foreign language? And what of these particular ones I study? What is the material that I want to get at... really? Where will this material take me? Why do I want to go there? What material is of complete interest to me (and to others), so much to the point that I will continually be motivated make adequate and intriguing contributions to my specialized field?

But, most important of all: Does the functionality of the system that is known as a "language" intrigue me more than how humans can express themselves through it? And which one of these is really more important, from a purely analytical perspective?

There are so many petty answers to these questions, but I want to real ones.

Here is his bio, it's pretty incredible: About Alexander Arguelles