On the other hand, history conspired to bring the languages of the world closer to Mezzofanti. Beginning at a fairly young age, he had three teachers, all of them Jesuit missionaries who had been expelled in 1767 from parts of the Spanish empire. They probably exposed Giuseppe to Spanish, Swedish, German, and French. They might have given him lessons in Tagalog and some indigenous American languages. Even more powerful than the language lessons would have been an introduction to the Jesuits’ scientific approach, which recognized the power of language, not only for converting savages but as a tool to export the West’s learning. To cite but one example among many, it was a Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who translated Euclid into Chinese.
At fifteen years old, after long nights in the library preparing for an exam, Mezzofanti collapsed. Afterward, he dropped out of school, and what occupied him for the next several years is unknown—perhaps he planed wood in his father’s workshop on Via Malcontenti. After recuperating, he finished school and in 1797, at the age of twenty-three, was ordained and appointed a professor of Arabic at the University of Bologna. He’d been making the trek up and down the Archiginnasio steps for barely half a year when European politics intervened. After refusing to swear an oath to the (short-lived) Cispadane Republic that Napoleón had carved out of northern Italy’s papal states in 1796, the young professor was cruelly stripped of his post.
I mention this political history to show how far-ranging and unpredictable the factors that make a hyperpolyglot can be. Had he kept his job, the young Mezzofanti would never have landed in the geographic and social spaces where multiple languages cross and congregate. From 1796 to 1800, the armies of Napoleón and the Austrian dynasty battled over the strategic and political prize of Bologna, where hospitals filled up with wounded men from all over the linguistically diverse Austrian empire, men who needed Mezzofanti’s priestly services. As nurse and confessor, Mezzofanti improved his German, and also picked up Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Flemish, and perhaps Romani. He claimed he could acquaint himself with a language in fourteen days. He did this, it was said, by asking the patient to say the ordinary prayers, from which he could discern words and patterns.
“In such cases,” Mezzofanti told Augustin Manavit, who wrote a biography in French of the cardinal, “accordingly, I used to apply myself, with all my energy, to the study of the language of the patients, until I knew enough of them to make myself understood.” He added: “Through the grace of God, assisted by my private studies, and by a retentive memory, I came to know, not merely the generic languages of the nations to which the several invalids belonged, but even the peculiar dialects of their various provinces.”
In his archives, I found records from this stretch of his life. He received a certificate, dated 1798, which commended him (in Italian) for helping “every time someone sick came to us speaking in a language unknown to us.” The next year, he received another certificate applauding him for his “tireless zeal” interpreting in various languages for the sick. So there’s a record of his learning languages from people, not from books, and from people with whom he may have shared no other language. This in itself isn’t a feat. Traders, explorers, and missionaries have always ventured among people who don’t speak their language, and either constructed a common one (a pidgin) or learned one another’s. Yet there’s no record of anyone else with the resources to acquire as many languages as Mezzofanti apparently did.
After losing his professorship, Mezzofanti supported his parents, his sister, and her family by teaching languages to foreigners and to children of rich families, who then hired him as a librarian for their private collections. He worked on languages mainly by seeking out travelers coming through Bologna. “The hotel keepers were in the habit of apprising me of the arrival of all strangers in Bologna,” Mezzofanti told Manavit. “I made no difficulty when anything was to be learned, about calling on them, interrogating them, making notes of their communications, and taking instructions from them in the pronunciation of their respective languages.”
Was Mezzofanti gifted? He seemed to possess an indigenous talent for some aspect of languages, and he matches some of the descriptions of other brilliant youths: he excelled despite training of variable quality (when he had it at all) and handled a great deal of linguistic material at a very young age. Also, he evidently had drive and a very long attention span.
“I made it a rule to learn every new grammar, and to apply myself to every strange dictionary that came within my reach,” he said. “I was constantly filling my head with new words; and, whenever any new strangers, whether of high or low degree, passed through Bologna, I endeavored to turn them to account, using the one for the purpose of perfecting my pronunciation, and the other for that of learning the familiar words and turns of expression.”
For most of his life, the Bolognese scholar priest was thin and pale. “His whole appearance,” noted one writer, “indicates delicacy.” In his later years he was described as a “cheerful old man.” Mrs. Polyxena Paget remembered him as “small in stature, dry, and of a pale unhealthy look. His whole person was in monkey-like restless motion.” His eyelids twitched. Reactions to this tic were varied. Some said it made him look weak.
He ate little, never drank wine, and slept only three hours a night. “During the long nights which he devoted to study he never, even in the coldest weather, permitted himself the indulgence of a fire,” wrote one of his biographers. He could not be persuaded to use the small portable brazier called a scaldino (or scaldén in Bolognese) favored by Italian students, to warm his hands or feet. Humble, he would not let people kiss his ring, the usual greeting that cardinals receive. Three times in his life he fell desperately ill, and each time, he admitted to a “confusion of languages.” After one illness, he temporarily forgot all his language acquisitions but Bolognese. There’s no record of how he got them back.
Among his jobs, he worked as confessore dei forestieri, the priest who heard the confessions of foreigners. Once the authorities called him to the jail cell of two prisoners who were to be executed the next morning. No one could hear their confessions. They were going to die sinners—because no one else could speak their language. That night, back in his room, Mezzofanti learned to speak it well enough by morning that he could confer God’s forgiveness before they went to the gallows.
Or that’s how the story goes.
Another time, a woman came to see Mezzofanti with a problem: her maid, who spoke only Sardinian (which no other priest in Bologna knew), wanted to confess her sins for Easter. Give me two weeks, Mezzofanti said, I’ll learn Sardinian. Laughing, the woman agreed, and every day for an hour, the maid visited with Mezzofanti. By Easter, it’s said, he could speak enough Sardinian to hear the maid’s confession.
On my first dive into Mezzofanti’s papers, I was impressed by the profusion of languages—how this frail fellow had scoured clean the world’s grammatical stables. Yet, as I went along, I became more disappointed with such mundane relics. Something was missing—the remnants of a process, even a miraculous one, for learning. If he’d had a method, I couldn’t find the instructions, or the word lists, or grammar exercises, or scraps of relevant notes. Maybe they’d been destroyed or weren’t worth saving. Maybe, with such a prodigious memory, he’d gotten most of it into his head at the first pass, where it stuck.
Then I discovered something that made me wonder what Mezzofanti had really been up to.
Chapter 4
After several days, my ability to read Mezzofanti’s ABCs had improved, even though his alephs and betas were nervous squiggles and his Chinese characters misshapen lumps. What bogged me down was the handwriting of his contemporaries—the letters he received had evidently been scrawled with tree branches and chicken feet, dipped in ink.
In this correspondence, I found evidence for the case I was hoping would not be disproved. Dating from the 1820s to the 1840s, he received letters in Latin, Modern Greek, Italian, English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Po
lish, and Arabic. It’s safe to say he could read all of these—none that I saw came with versions translated into Italian or Latin. He also wrote and read in Dutch, Turkish, Hungarian, and Catalan. Here was someone carrying on correspondence in fifteen languages, using four different alphabets!
Yet doubts started to creep in. Maybe it didn’t mean much—maybe he needed a dictionary to read and write. Did he do this? There was no way to tell. Experts say it’s easier to remember a word you’re going to recognize in speech or writing than if you have to speak or write it. On the other hand, being literate means you have less wiggle room for errors. The profusion was certainly impressive—Mezzofanti could function in as many languages as he needed to. But how well? What levels of proficiency had he attained?
With this question in mind, I pondered the Algonquin file. As an American, this made me smile: part of the first wave of American popular culture to hit Europe in Mezzofanti’s time was James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, and Mezzofanti spoke warmly of L’ultimo dei Mohicani. I wondered if Mezzofanti had brought these associations to his study of the language. In the file I found a sixty-page description of Algonquin grammar, not in Mezzofanti’s hand, along with scraps of paper with Algonquin words and phrases, translated into Italian or other languages, written in many styles. Perhaps they reflected the styles of his teachers.
Working through boxes, I’d been looking at a polyglot stew. I could be said to be “reading” only in English and the Romance languages, though I recognized many of the others. At one point, switching between descriptions in Italian and letters in Portuguese, I came upon the Algonquin grammar and then a set of conversational phrases, written on a page with Algonquin on one side and French on the other. Je te salue, mon fils. Te portes-tu bien? As-tu fait un bon voyage? As-tu fait une bonne traversée? I read along happily—oh, these are conversation starters, questions that Mezzofanti learned to ask in Algonquin. Perhaps he asked them of Native American converts he met in his office.
This struck me as funny. Did he learn such questions in other languages, too? If so, he could use them like a script. Meet a native speaker, pull out the pertinent questions. You’d seem polite—and in control of the conversation. Are you going to Naples? What’s the name of your town? Learn to pronounce it the right way, and you’d be highly regarded. You wouldn’t even have to understand the answers—you’d move on to the next question. How old are you?
One of Mezzofanti’s biographers claimed that Mezzofanti was “completely master” of Algonquin (though it’s not among the thirty languages he supposedly knew best). Mezzofanti claimed to have learned it from a longtime missionary in America. Based on what I saw in the archives, he might only have mastered Algonquin chitchat with Algonquin-speaking guests. Not Algonquin. Not jokes in Algonquin. Not politenesses. But a formula for performing in Algonquin.
How limited would Mezzofanti’s Algonquin have to be for us to cross it off his list of languages? Was this enough evidence to remove it from his list? And if it were removed, what other languages would have to be crossed off, too?
Before I could really consider the implications of this, I doubled back to check what language I’d been reading with such ease. French. I’d been reading in French as effortlessly as if it were English.
My first thought: But I don’t read French.
Next: What else have I been reading without knowing it?
And then: How much does a bit of language matter?
What you’re ultimately going to make of “bits of language” matters when you start to wrestle with the question of how many languages Mezzofanti knew and used. He left no definitive list of them; the resulting vacuum has long attracted controversy. Perhaps the first person to raise the issue in publication was Thomas Watts, a member of London’s Philological Society and an important figure in the expert dissection of Mezzofanti. An intermediary between the period of Romanticism, to which Mezzofanti belonged, and the rise of empirical science and the age of brain studies, Watts himself was said to read fifty languages, including Chinese. Watts’s essay “On the Extraordinary Powers of Cardinal Mezzofanti as a Linguist,” which he read to the Society in 1852, diligently assembled, for the first time in English, disparate accounts of the Bolognese lion of languages.
The other important figure was Charles William Russell, an Irish priest, scholar, and president of what was then called St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth (also known as Maynooth College), who’d met Mezzofanti in Rome twice and later, in 1858, wrote a clarifying biography, The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, which opened the cabinet of curiosities where Mezzofanti had been abandoned by science. Russell’s goal was to separate the facts from fantasy, the reality from the myth.
His book is an absolute treasure, studded with the names of royals and intellectuals, with fascinating whispered asides on every page. At the beginning, Russell devotes 120 pages to describing a menagerie of polyglot scholars, monarchs, missionaries, explorers, and warriors who knew many languages. Most came from European countries. Mithridates makes an appearance. So does Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a British judge in India and a philologist who said that he knew twenty-eight languages. Part of a chapter discusses infant prodigies and unschooled polyglots, such as the British traveler Tom Coryat (1577–1617), who walked all over Europe and eastern Mediterranean countries, accumulating Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and probably a dozen other languages he had no use for at home.
Against this backdrop, Russell sets Mezzofanti’s monumentalism: “Cardinal Mezzofanti will be found to stand so immeasurably above even the highest of these names . . . that, at least for the purposes of comparison with him, its minor celebrities can possess little claim for consideration,” he wrote.
An enemy of Mezzofanti’s skeptics, Russell contributed to a concrete case for his skill by creating a list of languages that Mezzofanti knew. More important, he lent a sense of order to the reports of firsthand observations. He borrowed a basic framework from William Jones, who had sorted his own twenty-eight languages according to his abilities in each.* The result produced something like the following.
Russell placed fourteen of Mezzofanti’s languages at the lowest level, which meant that he’d studied the grammar and vocabulary but had never been observed using the languages: Sanskrit, Malay, “Tonquinese,” Cochin-Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Icelandic, Lappish, “Ruthenian,” Frisian, Lettish, Cornish, Quechua, and Bimbarra. In seven other languages, he could begin a conversation and knew conversational phrases: Sinhalese, Burmese, Japanese, Irish, Gaelic, Chippewa, Delaware, and “some of the languages of Oceanica.” Such linguistic adventuring may be impressive, though one has to note that this calculation means that Mezzofanti possessed only bits of language in a third of the seventy-two languages with which Russell credits him.
According to Russell’s best evidence, Mezzofanti had only the rudiments in two more sets of languages. He could converse in eleven more, though there were too few eyewitness reports of his Kurdish, Georgian, Serbian, Bulgarian, “Gipsy language,” Peguan, Welsh, Angolese, “Mexican,” “Chilian,” and “Peruvian” to really pin down his abilities. (Which puts the modern observer in the peculiar position of having to suppose that Mezzofanti might have had greater abilities in some languages than anyone knew.) However, in nine languages (Syriac, Ethiopian, “Amarinna,” Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, Wallachian, “Californian,” and Algonquin) he “spoke less perfectly . . . in all of which, however, his pronunciation, at least, is described as quite perfect,” Russell wrote.
Yet there were thirty languages that Russell and Watts agreed, more or less, that Mezzofanti had mastered. “These he spoke with freedom,” Russell wrote, “and with a purity of accent, of vocabulary, and of idiom, rarely attained by foreigners.” He defined Mezzofanti’s “fluency” as an ability to talk without interruption (regardless of content) and with grammatical accuracy. “Above all,” Russell wrote, a man could be truly said to know a language thoroughly “if he be admitted by intelligen
t and educated natives to speak it correctly and idiomatically.”
For his part, Watts defined “mastery” as being “able to speak [a language] with perfect fluency and correctness,” which would match “in the knowledge of it, on a level with the majority of the natives.” In addition to perfect pronunciation, Watts also noted that the cardinal “conversed” in his languages, greeting people with “great spirit and precision.” In his reckoning, the real measure of a rare ability would lie in conversation.
The thirty (as listed by Russell) were Hebrew, Rabbinical Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, Coptic, Ancient Armenian, Modern Armenian, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, Greek, Romaic, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish,* English, Illyrian, Russian, Polish, Czech (which Russell calls Bohemian), Hungarian, and Chinese.
Interestingly, these were the thirty languages he’d learned before he was thirty years old, according to reports. They represented a whopping eleven linguistic families,* five of which (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Hellenic, and Semitic) gave him the bulk of his acquisitions. With that much learning experience, each language would have become a small variation on a broader theme, providing a learning boost for each subsequent one. If he read these languages, he would have grappled with six different alphabets (I knew that he didn’t read Chinese—trying to do so caused him some sort of breakdown—so I don’t count it here).
On a total language count, Watts and Russell would eventually disagree. Russell said Mezzofanti had seventy-two languages, a number with some religious significance: it was the number of languages that was said to have resulted from the Tower of Babel’s fall. Watts disputed some of Russell’s sources, eliminated duplications, and without mentioning Russell’s overlay of religious symbolism, reduced the overall repertoire to sixty or sixty-one.
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