Ziad Fazah
Ziad Youssef Fazah (Arabic: زياد فصاح) (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Liberian-born Lebanese polyglot. Fazah himself claims to speak 59 languages and maintains that he has proved this in several television shows, where he "successfully" communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.[1]
The Guinness Book of World Records, up to the 1998 edition, listed Fazah as being able to speak and read 58 languages, citing a live interview in Athens, Greece July 1991.[2]
However, in Viva el lunes, a Chilean TV program featuring Ziad Fazah, he failed to understand beginner level phrases in Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Greek and Hindi. He even wrongly recognized Russian as Croatian in being unable to comprehend what "Какой сегодня день недели?" ("What day of the week is it today?") means[3].
Fazah claims he can speak, read and understand the following languages:
Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Kyrgyz, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Papiamento, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shanghainese, Sinhala, Spanish, Standard Tibetan, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek and Vietnamese.[1]
Fazah currently lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Scapin, Rafael. "Ziad Youssef Fazah: o Maior Poliglota do Mundo". Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. http://web.archive.org/web/20070927065537/http://www.scapin.org/ziad_fazah.htm. Retrieved 2007-11-12. (Portuguese) - An article adapted from Fazah's "Ensinando a Aprender Espanhol".
- ^ Norris McWhirter (1997). The Guinness Book of World Records 1997. Random House. p. 249.
- ^ Parts of Fazah's appearance on "Viva el lunes": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XA1Ifi-ntE
[edit] See Also
[edit] External links
- "First Person: Ziad Fazah". Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5a6ab3b4-3c0d-11dd-9cb2-0000779fd2ac.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
- "Ziad Fazah in Viva el lunes in Chilean TV". Viva el lunes, Canal 13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fUSuXHX5Kc&NR=1. Retrieved 2009-09-10. (Spanish)
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