Talk:Harold Williams (linguist)

[Untitled]
--Te Karere (talk) 01:17, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I would have liked to have done more to expand this article on Harold Williams, but I lack the time at this moment. Much information about him can be found at this page:

http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/williams.html

However, I tried to use as little as possible, to avoid copyright infringement (I'm a little fuzzy on how much is legally usable under Fair Use).

This article is largely taken and plagarized from the first external link, from what I know about fair use. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.16.161.209 (talk) 05:20, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

12,000 characters would be extreme even for a very well-educated native Chinaman. That's why Chinese people have dictionaries. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.163.65.9 (talk) 10:18, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

This looks like pretty bad plagiarism, and plagiarism of a pretty doubtful source. Describing Latin as "one of the great root languages" (copied verbatim) is at best very non-linguistic/non-scientific. And how well did he speak the languages really? Listing languages as a binary spoken/not spoken doesn't really make sense, there's a lot of steps between saying hello and speaking like a native. Claims of hyperpolyglottism tend to be highly misleading, and I'm not convinced that this is an exception. Donostia Gipuzkoa (talk) 21:25, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd be curious to see a list of the 58 languages he supposedly knew. Muzilon (talk) 10:17, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Cornish Language
Did he ever learn the Cornish language?Bodrugan (talk) 03:49, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Reassessed as C class
I have dropped the article back to C class, as it fails two B class criteria:
 * It needs inline citations, and
 * The lead is far too short for an article of this length.  Schwede 66  01:24, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Born in ...
Williams was born in Auckland, as per the article. Just in case anybody ever comes across this page on the website of the Christchurch City Libraries, you can rest assured that they've got it wrong when they say that he was born in Christchurch. I quizzed them on it, and here's what one of their librarians replied:

"We have found references in the birth index and on Paperspast that indicate that Harold Williams birth was registered in Auckland. The chronology is on the libraries website is from a council publication and we are not sure what reference was originally used."

The book they refer to is the Christchurch chronology: a history of settlement. Oddly, it would appear that they are unwilling to update their online version, despite knowing that they've got it wrong.  Schwede 66  23:23, 26 May 2013 (UTC)