Trilingual Bilingual Quotes

Un homme qui parle trois langues est trilingue. Un homme qui parle deux langues est bilingue. Un homme qui ne parle qu'une langue est anglais

If you speak three languages you're trilingual. If you speak two languages you're bilingual. If you speak the language of the opposite sex, you can communicate.

Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages. With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.

In the past, the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the Cuneiform scripts were deciphered because bilingual and multilingual texts were discovered. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs were understood once the Rosetta stone was found in Egypt by soldier in the army of Napoleon in 1799. The cuneiform too was deciphered once the Behistun trilingual inscriptions were found in western Iran. There have been no corresponding inscriptions found for the Harappan script, yet. Since the seals have also been discovered in Mesopotamia and we know that there were trade relations between the two civilisations, it is likely that there might, one day, turn up a Rosetta stone for the Harappan script.