Alexander Arguelles

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Alexander Arguelles
Born 1964 (age 43–44)
Occupation Professor of Philology, hyperpolyglot, and author

Contents

Biography and language learning

Professor Alexander Arguelles, philologist, hyperpolyglot, and founder and principal exponent of Polyglottery as a scholarly discipline, was born on April 30, 1964 into an exclusively English-speaking American household.1 He grew up primarily in New York City, where future novelist Jonathan Lethem was a friend and classmate; however, he lived in various parts of Europe during his earliest years, and his family traveled abroad regularly and extensively throughout his childhood. Furthermore, his father, poet Ivan Arguelles, is a scholarly polyglot whose shelves are filled with books in many different tongues.2

Dr. Arguelles obtained his B.A. from Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He earned his B.A. in comparative literature in 1986 and his Ph.D. in the comparative history of religions in 1994. At the University of Chicago he worked closely with his advisor, Ioan Culianu, until the latter was assassinated on May 21, 19913; thereafter, he worked with Wendy Doniger, completing his dissertation on Viking Dreams: Mythological and Religious Dream Symbolism in the Old Norse Sagas under her supervision. From 1994-1996, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Scholarship.

A Professor of Philology, he spent nearly a decade in Korea following a monastic life style,4 while he dedicated his time to studying Korean, Classical Chinese and Japanese in a comparative context, as he taught at Handong University. Following his marriage and the completion of his Korean studies, he relocated to Lebanon, where he resided studying Arabic and designing and teaching a Great Books core-curriculum as chairman of the department of humanities at the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut until, in July of 2006, he and his family were forced to flee Lebanon due to the outbreak of war.

Dr. Arguelles has written, co-written, and published a quadrilingual dictionary (English, French, German, Spanish), a manual for the study of Korean, an exhaustive analysis of the Korean verbal system, and a number of advanced readers for the study of North Korean speech. He currently teaches polyglottery in California, moderates a language-learning forum on the internet, posts educational videos, and continues to write. He is also working on a plan of creating a private institute for the intensive study of foreign languages using the methods he has developed for effective and efficient foreign language acquisition. He aspires to establish Polyglottery as an interdisciplinary academic field combining comparative philology with Great Books education, the fundamental principle being that if classic works are worth reading, then they are worth reading in their original tongue of composition.

Languages Alexander Arguelles has studied

Dr. Arguelles' transcripts reveal that, while an undergraduate at Columbia University, he did course work in: French, German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he did further course work in: Old French, Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse. While at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Scholarship, he continued to study Teutonic and Romance languages, both living and historic. It was in Korea, particularly in the period 1996-2000, that he began the study of most of the languages he has investigated.5.

A systematic study chart posted on his website 6 indicates that he attempts to devote regular time to improving his knowledge of what are generally regarded as 58 different languages, as follows:

Germanic: English, Middle English, Old English (Anglo-Saxon); German, Middle High German, Old High German; Dutch, Middle Dutch, Afrikaans; Frisian; Gothic; Icelandic, Old Norse, Faroese; Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norwegian (Bokmål), Danish, Swedish, Old Swedish.

Romance: Latin; Romanian; Italian; Occitan (Provençal); Catalan; Spanish; Portuguese; French, Old French.

Slavic: Russian; Ukranian; Polish; Czech (Slovak); Serbocroatian (Bosnian); Bulgarian (Macedonian); Old Church Slavonic.

Celtic: Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Manx Gaelic, Old Irish; Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Middle Welsh.

Hellenic: Ancient Greek, Modern Greek

Indic: Sanskrit; Hindi, Urdu

Iranian: Persian (Farsi)

Semitic: Modern Standard Arabic, Levantine Arabic

East Asian: Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Classical Chinese

Altaic: Turkish

Bantu: Swahili

Constructed: Esperanto

The names and details of this list notwithstanding, both on his website7 and on his forum8, Dr. Arguelles has always been very reticent to claim to know any particular number of languages without a thorough consideration of both a) what is meant by a “language” and b) what it means to know a language. He clearly values the development of literary reading skills more than any other aspect of mastery, and also relishes comparative philological analysis for its own sake; still, he is indeed able to speak a fair number of the living languages contained on these study charts. Because he has had the most active exposure to them, he can converse most readily and respectably in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Korean (11 languages, 10 excluding his native English). Based both upon his abilities in these languages and upon his extensive studies, he can also enter successfully into communicative situations in the other Germanic, Romance, and, to a lesser extent, Slavic languages. Finally, his foundation in Irish, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, and especially Persian is such that he could not only survive but actually activate these languages if plunged into the living context of an immersion situation in them. All told, Dr. Arguelles can probably speak, at least to a certain extent, about half of the languages that he knows.


Language study materials and methodology

[I] Dr. Arguelles’ Introductions to Germanic Languages:

[II] Dr. Arguelles’ Reviews of Language Study Materials:

[III] Dr. Arguelles’ Demonstrations of his Language Study Methodologies:

[IV] Dr. Arguelles' Series of Persian (Farsi) Textual Readings:

Books by Alexander Arguelles

  • North Korean Reader (2008)
  • Korean Newspaper Reader (293 pages, Dunwoody Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1-931546-37-9
  • English French Spanish German Dictionary (735 pages, Librairie du Liban, 2006) ISBN 9953-86-056-4
  • A Handbook of Korean Verbal Conjugation (Co-author: Jonrok Kim, 311 pages, Dunwoody Press, 2004) ISBN 1-931546-03-7
  • A Historical Literary and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language (Co-author: Jonrok Kim, 318 pages, Hollym, 2000) ISBN: 1-56591-151-2
  • 프랑스어 동사변화안내 La Conjugaison des Verbes (345 pages, 신아사, 1999) ISBN: 89-3896-066-3
  • Viking Dreams: Mythological and Religious Dream Symbolism in the Old Norse Sagas (460 pages, University of Chicago Doctoral Dissertation, 1994. UMI Dissertation Services Order Number: 9425353 www.umi.com)

External links

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  • This page was last modified on 19 November 2008, at 01:47.

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