Babel No More

by Michael Erard

  Before we parted, DeKeyser shared a dim memory from the late 1980s, in which a Belgian bank, now defunct, had sponsored a contest to find the most multilingual Belgian. A sort of language game, with rules. Hundreds of people had applied. Contestants were tested in brief conversations with native speakers from universities and embassies.

  “Of course, a lot of people claimed a lot more languages, but they couldn’t do very much in these languages,” he said. “One of my colleagues was involved in testing one person in Hindi, and this person knew a lot about Hindi and could converse a bit. But could you say this person knew Hindi?”

  He couldn’t remember the bank or the name of the winner or how multilingual he or she proved to be. Of course, the number of languages would have to be very small. Maybe, DeKeyser said, only eight?

  A real, living hyperpolyglot whose oral skills have been assessed by experts? Hmm, I thought. Now, that’s definitely someone I’d like to meet.

  Chapter 3

  Seen from the window of my penthouse bed-and-breakfast, the red roofs and orange walls of Bologna’s buildings glowed like embers. Down there, somewhere, was Mezzofanti’s secret, waiting to be unearthed. Each morning, I woke early to look at the sun pouring over the roofs, the cathedral, and the two tall, leaning towers, the Due Torri, rising from the spreading light. An elevator cage rattled up the shaft to greet me and delivered me to the first floor. I walked through the cool porticos of the narrow, jumbled streets as single scooters buzzing down the cobblestones scuffed the morning quiet.

  Along the way to the library that housed Mezzofanti’s archive, I’d stop at a bar for espresso and a pastry. My first morning, I could only ask for un espresso, point, and shrug. Does anyone care how well a visiting foreign writer talks in the local tongue? By the end of the week, I was better at shrugging, was pointing less, and had mastered Per favore, un espresso e un dolce; Come pagare; and Come si dice. I had also learned the essential phrase Non posso parlare italiano, which will always be true.

  Under a statue of Luigi Galvani, the eighteenth-century physician who discovered how electricity moves muscles, I read the newspaper, in English, until the gates to the Archiginnasio public library opened. Built between 1562 and 1563, the Archiginnasio housed the university until 1803; part of this large public facility became the municipal library in 1838, and now its courtyards and grand lecture halls offer a miniature history of Bologna. During World War II, Allied bombs damaged most of it—though, luckily for me, the Mezzofanti papers stored there had been spirited to the hills. One day, I drifted into the anatomical theater, a large wood-paneled room lined with wooden statues of ancient scientists and doctors. Destroyed in the bombing, these statues rested high on the walls and had been reconstructed to look down, as they had during the Renaissance, on a central marble dissection table. There, in the name of medical science, the bodies of executed criminals had been cut apart, sectioned, labeled, and compared. Never, though, the bodies of hyperpolyglots. Or their brains.

  I’d painted a nice picture for myself of how my first day in the rare manuscript room would go. I’d come in and introduce myself with magical Italian fluency, then blow the dust off a box lid and find—oh, confessions, boasts, poems, or perhaps the parchment on which a pact with Mephistopheles was signed in blood, promising a lifetime of unlimited linguistic capacity and an eternity in the Dark One’s company. Evidence of Mezzofanti’s prowess would be so irrefutable, the truth about the cardinal could now be revealed.

  What did happen was more like this: I stumbled up the stairs, following signs I could barely decipher. Biblioteca and manoscritti, easy enough. The woman at the guard desk stopped me with a stream of Italian before I could make the common signal for I don’t speak your language. I shrugged my shoulders—she kept talking. Then I tried the universal gesture for I’d like to look at the manuscripts. Manuscritti, I said. Manoscritti? Sì. She pointed down the hall. I turned to walk. No, no, no, she said. Exasperated with my stupidity, she gestured to my laptop, then handed me a slip of paper to fill out: nome, indirizzo, telefono. Fine; I filled it out. The paper stamped, where to go now? She pointed. Down the hall.

  The room that housed rare manuscripts was long and high-ceilinged with tall bookshelves behind glass doors. In the archival-quality silence, librarian heads swiveled when I entered. “Buongiorno,” I said. “Buongiorno,” said one librarian, a middle-aged woman with a decidedly curdled attitude. I knew only the name of the librarian I’d emailed a few weeks before—me writing in English, her replying in Italian, me putting her replies into online translation tools. Paola Foschi? I asked, pronouncing it foshee. The uptight librarian added an expression of puzzlement. Ah, she said, foskee, then she asked me to wait.

  Another woman with narrow glasses and pursed lips approached me, and I introduced myself. Her eyes lit up with recognition, and a flood of Italian came out of her mouth, the only recognizable word being Mezzofanti. We’d communicated so well by email. Now we faced each other like sailors from two distant nations with a sail to raise or a whale to harpoon and no shared words for getting it done except Mezzofanti. Sì, Mezzofanti, I said. She went off, bustled at one of the bookshelves, and presented me with a bound ledger, about two feet long and fourteen inches wide, a handwritten catalog of every single item in the ninety-odd boxes of Mezzofanti’s collection.

  This was the inventario. Paging through it for a minute, I felt my heart sink. Each entry had been written with a light quill pen, the handwriting ornate and illegible. I mentally kicked myself: I should have practiced reading nineteenth-century handwriting before I came, and now I’ve wasted a trip. I fought through a few more pages. If there’s information here, I won’t recognize it, I realized. Forget secrets.

  At that moment, Paula Foschi interrupted me, pushing another massive volume across the table’s dark wood and gesturing for me to open it. It was a duplicate inventario volume, devoted to Mezzofanti and written in a modern, readable hand. I wanted to kneel in thanks.

  Immediately the dizzying polyglot nature of the inventario was revealed. Of all ninety boxes of his papers, which were filled with writing in Latin, Italian, and other languages, I was most interested in the first half-dozen boxes, devoted to his linguistic acquisitions. The contents were arranged alphabetically, by language: Angolana, Armena, Birmana, Bolognese, Catalan, Cinese, Inglese. On and on they went. Eventually I counted fifty-six languages, all sporting their Italian names. It was like a map of a desert as vast and forbidding as the desert itself.

  The inventario described the contents of each box, down to the individual item: family letters, official correspondence, official documents. Some just said “miscellaneous.” How these had been identified and by whom, I didn’t know, but it had been a polyglot someone. I was jealous of that someone, who could have told me what those documents actually said. The entries described each one, and when relevant, cited its first few lines—in Italian or Latin, German, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Armenian. Often entries said, “a letter in German,” “a letter in Dutch.” Sometimes the cataloger, stumped, maybe overwhelmed, tagged it merely as a “ Componimento di ________.”

  The relics of the hyperpolyglot saint. Mezzofanti. He’s real, I thought, absolutely real. By the end of the day, my head swam with fragments of languages and alphabets, and I couldn’t wait to continue my search. I was tapping, tapping, tapping: listening for something hollow and hoping to find something big.

  My second morning in Bologna, when the bartender asked me for due euro, instead of handing over five and hoping the breakfast cost less, I gave him the two he asked for. In the manuscript room, the librarians smiled when I arrived. “Buongiorno,” they said, which meant Welcome! And also, We’re sure you’ll read flawlessly in Italian today! We’re happy to bring you boxes, but only two before lunch!

  Yesterday, I had looked only at the inventario’s listings. Today I planned to dig into the boxes themselves, which arrived on a wheeled cart, one by one. Constructed out o
f cardboard to look like books, they were antiqued with a patina of dust. Opening the lid released a musty smell—some hadn’t been cracked for decades. (The scrupulous librarians pantomimed how I should add my signature to a list of others on a sheet inside the boxes.)

  First box, first file. In “Angolana,” whatever that was, were four items of versi. One a poem about Bethlehem, another about the Three Kings. Dated 1844, 1845, 1847, and 1848. Between the sentences was a Latin translation of each. Had my cardinal written these? If he knew Angolana, why did he need the Latin translation, too? I was tapping, tapping, and here was a hollow sound, which I ignored in order to move on.

  The next file, labeled Coptic, contained two poems about the Three Kings, another about Bethlehem, with Latin translations. This repetition of themes would make sense to me only later. Many letters, but not in the twiggy scrawl that I would come to recognize as Mezzofanti’s. On and on it came, on stiff, browned paper, cut in all sorts of irregular sizes. Time had reduced some of it to the texture of a butterfly’s wing.

  The next box. Albanian (a poem, a list of verbs, and some sentences); Algonquin (a grammar, a dictionary, and a catechism, none written in Mezzofanti’s hand, but the first part of a translation of the Book of Genesis, which was his); Amharic; Arabic (a long lecture by Mezzofanti about the history of Arabic); Basque (a collection of words); Burmese (some prose); Bohemian (some language exercises); “Californian” (a grammatical sketch of Luiseño, an indigenous American language, which wasn’t done by Mezzofanti); Quechua, a native South American language (a list of words, not in Mezzofanti’s hand); Persian (a poem by Mezzofanti about a Persian poet); and other assorted items in Chinese; Coptic (Egyptian written with an adapted Greek alphabet); Danish; Hebrew; Ethiopian (a translated letter); French; Greek; English; Italian; Latin; “Livonese” (possibly Livonian, a nearly extinct language once spoken in what is now Latvia and Estonia); Maltese; and Dutch. Already I was finding evidence that Mezzofanti, indeed, knew parts of many languages. But how well did he know Algonquin or Burmese? That was less clear.

  The inventario listed many versi. I looked up versi in my dictionary. The first meaning was what I’d expected: “verse, poetry.”

  The less literal meanings surprised me. Second was “sound, noise, cry,” as an animal might. Third was “silly noise.” Next was “direction, way.” Next was “way,” as in method: Per un verso o per un altro.

  If you know Italian well, this cluster of verse, sound, animal cry, silly noise, way, and method might seem perfectly natural, like a snail in its shell, like a leaf on a tree. Some would say these meanings are the surfaced tips of submerged metaphors whose linkages, though very real, aren’t visible. Perhaps the mark of knowing a language is an ability to grasp what’s submerged as surely as you or I can recognize in a glance three connected lines as a triangle. Certainly Mezzofanti knew his native Bolognese this way, maybe a few other languages, too. But did he know all fifty-eight or seventy-two or one hundred fourteen of them like this? For that miracle alone, Mezzofanti might have been canonized, back in the days when people believed that a person could really be in two locations at once (as Saint Catherine could do) or levitate (as Saint Joseph of Copertino could do). Today this claim would garner only skepticism.

  Sitting at that long table in the Archiginnasio, looking through the contents of the first box, I realized I was so intent on the voices of doubters and believers going back and forth in my head that I had stopped paying attention to the boxes and their contents. Stop, I told myself. You just got here. Stop and look. Revelations will come.

  That afternoon, I wandered up Via Malcontenti, the street where Mezzofanti was born. A narrow side street, its only storefronts now are a tanning salon, a small grocery, and a sex shop. You’d have to tow the parked cars, drag away the trash bins, and clean the graffiti from the walls to capture a ghost of Malcontenti as it was when Giuseppe Mezzofanti lived there. Opposite the sex shop, about twenty feet high on a cracked wall, is a plaque that reads, in Latin:

  Here was born Mezzofanti, who by a miracle was uniquely able to learn the speech of every country.

  Under it sits another plaque, this one in Italian, that reads:

  Here there was a carpenter shop

  where Giuseppe Mezzofanti

  the most supreme of polyglots

  in 1781 at the age of 7

  with Francis his father

  worked with a plane and a saw.

  You couldn’t pick a better way to emanate a powerfully miraculous vibe in Catholic Bologna than by being the unusually talented son of a carpenter. It was said that young Giuseppe worked on a bench in the street, before a building where a priest, Father Respighi, tutored rich boys in Greek and Latin. Overhearing the recitations from the window, the carpenter’s son soaked them up. When Respighi discovered this, he pleaded with Giuseppe’s reluctant father to let the boy go to school.

  It’s true that Mezzofanti was born, raised, and lived on Via Malcontenti until 1831, when he moved to Rome, where he died and was buried in 1849. But his early education likely began with less drama than this tale would imply. According to family sources, he attended a basic school from the age of three, at first merely to keep him out of mischief while his parents worked, but it was soon discovered that he knew the lessons, too. There began his study of Latin, ancient Greek, and French. A hundred years earlier, a Bolognese boy who displayed intellectual promise could have become a scholar or an artist, gone into business, or become a military man, but in a declining city tightly controlled by the Church, the best path for a bright boy born in the latter half of the eighteenth century was the priesthood. At twelve, Giuseppe entered the seminary.

  No matter which story you believe, Mezzofanti’s work with languages seems to have begun when he was very young. This gave him important early experiences with many sorts of sounds and ways to structure words and sentences. Once he was in the seminary, his language studies intensified—Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, more German, more French—and this early exposure clearly gave him an advantage later on.

  Now we’d say that the young student’s brain was plastic, and that he was taking advantage of his youth, when the neural circuits in his brain that control the physical and mental actions involved in language were still very flexible. In time, this plasticity dwindles. Around the age of six is said to be the cutoff for acquiring a native-like pronunciation, because the brain’s connections between sounds you perceive and the motor commands for reproducing them harden early.

  However, even among bilingual children, the second language, no matter how early it’s learned, may be accented, especially if it’s spoken less than the first. By around twelve, very few are likely to ever sound native, as a rule. (Though some individuals can, especially if the language they’re learning is similar to their first.) By fifteen, a person will not easily have a native-like grammar. (Though a few people do, especially if the languages are similar.) After that time, adults can learn words and what they mean fairly well—it’s something we do in our native languages for our entire lives. And though picking up new grammatical rules is harder, adults are literate and have longer attention spans, both of which benefit them as learners.

  Maybe Mezzofanti had other advantages. What could they have been? Take a look at the pedagogical techniques of his day. Imagine a small room crammed with desks, boys hunched over worn-out books, reading in hypnotic unison sentences they didn’t comprehend, then one by one translating aloud into Latin or Italian when the teacher prompted. Containing few everyday words, the sentences are long, round, and come from poetry, the Bible, or classical works. Grammatical patterns, lists of verbs or noun cases, are recited, but novel sentences are never created. No, these methods probably weren’t so special, actually.

  Is this a credible beginning for a hyperpolyglot? A modern person would think, To communicate, one must communicate. To talk meaningfully, one must have explicit lessons in doing so, you might suppose. But Mezzofanti did no role plays, no skits; had no phone app
s; didn’t Skype with his native-speaking tutor. The language lab was an invention two hundred years away. As I later found, hyperpolyglots tend to succeed no matter the type of specific teaching methods. Some are devoted autodidacts; others happily study in classrooms; others learn what they need from other speakers. One can also pinpoint the benefits of the kind of schooling that Mezzofanti did receive. Studying Latin and ancient Greek gave him a good start in Romance-language vocabulary and the structure of Indo-European languages, as well as broad experience with two alphabets. (He’d go on to read and maybe write in a total of six.) And though the educational tradition suffers compared to what we do today, it gave him two important tools for his linguistic enterprise: an accomplished memory and confidence.

  Not many advantages came from his broader environment, which wasn’t particularly multilingual. Had he been immersed in a setting with many languages, he might have picked them up, at home and in the streets. Yet Giuseppe didn’t live in a border town or a capital city. His family didn’t migrate; both parents were Bolognese. Giuseppe himself didn’t travel outside of northern Italy until the middle of his life, so he probably never encountered the other Italian languages in the places where they had originated. Had he been able to surmount the mores of his family’s laborer class in order to travel, he might have found that up and down the Italian peninsula, so many different varieties of languages were used that Italy was, as one scholar puts it, “a riot of linguistic variation.” Most people were probably monolingual, speaking only the local dialect. In 1860, when an independent, stable Italian republic was finally established, only 10 percent of the population spoke the prestigious Florentine dialect we now call the Italian language.