Certainly, Cook wrote to me in an email, humans tend to leave their multicompetence unexplored. “I think that the human ability to learn languages in natural environments is mostly untapped,” he wrote. But what are the upper limits of multicompetence, however you want to define that? He was unable to say.
Without being able to observe Mezzofanti directly, it’s hard to nail down the scope or depth of his multicompetence. You can, if you indulge in a bit of anachronism, imagine what he (or anyone) would have to do to gain the same accolades now. For instance, according to the current European Commission standard for language proficiency, a person at the highest rating—someone we would say had “mastered” a language—has to “have a good command of idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms,” “convey finer shades of meaning precisely,” and “backtrack and restructure around a difficulty so smoothly the interlocutor is hardly aware of it.” I can’t say in how many languages Mezzofanti really had such abilities.
To be sure, there’s a big difference between a truly multicompetent person and someone with lots of “bits of language,” who would have a hard time succeeding, for instance, at a set of language competitions that the German government has held since 1985 for students between seventeen and nineteen years old. They undergo a yearlong battery of tests, including discussing a cartoon and a text; submitting a written exam that involves translating, writing, and summarizing; writing a 3,000-word essay; and participating in oral exams as well as a multilingual debating session. Faking abilities, much less in the required minimum of two languages (they can work in as many as four), would be impossible.
Several years ago, I interviewed a member of the US intelligence community who went to job fairs recruiting foreign-language experts and, every so often, met a person who claimed to speak forty languages. Inevitably, the claim was accompanied with the word “fluently.”
He greeted these with exasperated disbelief. I’m a non-native learner of six languages, he told me. I know what I need to do to learn a language, I know what I need to do to get good at it. Not only are the claims implausible, they’re unsupported. No one who says he or she has forty languages has ever tested out in all of them.
He then described to me what he hired people to do. They’d have to know how to distinguish a prayer from a coded transmission. How to parse the speech of a non-native speaker, mispronunciations, errors, and all—someone who may or may not be nervous, who may be speaking in a dialect, who might be using a cell phone connection with lots of static and environmental noise. You don’t get skills like that by watching a few movies. It takes hundreds of hours of practice. It takes firsthand experience in the culture. Given the stakes, analysts should have them.
Could anyone do this in thirty languages? Probably not. But one’s ultra competence in one language could certainly be informed by a sizable multicompetence in dozens. Indeed, my contact said he works with people who are very good in ten to fifteen languages, people who say, I’ve got to go learn Georgian, and off they go, and then return and say, I’m going to Estonian school, all while they’re studying Turkish at home. In multilingual environments like this, amazing feats of language prowess are everyday affairs. He told me about a former colleague who wanted to learn languages well enough to quote proverbs in them. It became a game between him and his hosts to sit and quote obscure proverbs to each other. “This guy was untouchable as far as languages go,” my contact marveled.
Even for a person with a good working knowledge of a language that falls short of nativeness, not all professional avenues are closed. Mezzofanti might fare better by the standards of the aviation industry and its expectations for English proficiency among pilots and air traffic controllers. In 2008, the International Civil Aviation Organization (or ICAO, a United Nations–mandated agency) introduced requirements that they be able to speak and understand English to a certain level of proficiency by March 2011. The goal was to make the Babel of the skies clearer and safer.
Implementing the standards butted against some linguistic realities, though. One was the diversity of accented Englishes that pilots and controllers encounter every single day. In one nine-hour observation, Turkish air traffic controllers interacted with 160 pilots from Turkish airlines, 14 from German airlines, and 104 pilots from airlines from 26 other countries—all speaking English. Yet only 2 of the 104 pilots worked for airlines based in an English-speaking country and presumably were native English speakers.
Rather than focus on producing native-like English speakers, ICAO focused on flying and landing airplanes safely. You didn’t need to discourse about squids or default swaps or the existence of God, as you might have to do in other tests of language proficiency. Instrumentation and weather terminology are more relevant topics. You don’t need to speak English like an American or a Brit; you have to be intelligible. This is no easy feat, but it’s one that, unlike native pronunciation, is achievable by adults. And you don’t have to be error-free. After all, even native speakers make errors.
Most important was the ability to manage a conversation by asking for clarification, communicating understanding, and rephrasing one’s request or description, among other things. A surprisingly large amount of talk between pilots and controllers is about the talk itself; one study in France concluded that only about one-quarter of what they say concerns the actual flying of the plane. Everything else is asking for repetition and clarification, and managing who’s speaking when. Such skills are also achievable by adults as a part of their linguistic multicompetence.
These new standards are meant to complement the stock of set phrases used by pilots and air traffic controllers. Using only well-practiced set phrases, a pilot could sound perfectly fluent and fly the plane safely. This is true—provided that systems are working and conditions are normal. If they’re not, and extra discussion is required, the consequences can be fatal.
In 1993, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 jet crashed in China, killing twelve and injuring twenty-four, after coming in to land too low. “Pull up, pull up,” the airplane’s automatic controls warned. The Chinese pilot’s last words: “What does ‘pull up, pull up’ mean?” In 1995, an American Airlines Boeing 757 on its way from Miami to Cali, Colombia, crashed in the mountains when the plane went off course. The pilots’ own confusion was a major cause of the accident. American Airlines investigators also speculated that the pilots and the air traffic controller had run out of phraseology—they didn’t share the stock of phrases to help with problem-solving. The pilots didn’t speak Spanish; the controller later said that because his command of English was limited, he couldn’t convey his misgivings to the crew. The annals of aviation tragedies and near-disasters are filled with stories about language failures—something that ICAO desperately wants to change.
If these institutional standards seem too loose or too restrictive, you could let hyperpolyglots themselves define the standards of their multicompetence. Because there’s no community in which those standards grow, no hyperpolyglot police, this can be tricky. Yet it’s worth inquiring what polyglots expect themselves to be able to do.
In the online survey I opened up to people who know six or more languages, I asked what it meant to “know” a language. Most people replied that you had to do be able to do things in that language: talk to natives, express oneself, consume media. No one described the relevance of immediacy. To this crew, to say you “know” a language, the ability to call it up and use it without preparation, is not required—which is something like saying, “Yes, I have a screwdriver,” and yet having to walk back to your house to get it. Also, not a single one of the seventeen hyperpolyglots who claimed to know eleven or more languages said that sounding like a native speaker was important at all. In fact, doing anything like a native was not, for them, a sign of success. This included knowing anything about the culture. Only one person listed knowing the culture as important, then added that your average person doesn’t even know his or her mother tongue’s culture completely. Instead, they focused o
n comfort at functional abilities: one must know how to speak, read, and write “intelligently,” “without major difficulty,” and “without feeling that I have to avoid any theme or activity.”
“I reach a point,” one person wrote, “where the grammar clicks in my head where the structure—any structure—is there to create sentences. It’s a matter of knowing the vocabulary and how to use that vocabulary to fill in the structure.”
You don’t want to “get lost in the community where the language is spoken”—knowing a language isn’t about blending in, it’s about moving through communities, and indeed moving from one community to another with no obligation to stay. Flowing through languages, flowing through the world. In my travels among polyglots, it would become a consistent theme.
From my perspective in Bologna, it looked as if Mezzofanti had had a very rich linguistic life. Claire Kramsch had compared this to someone practicing musical scales, someone merely mastering a code. What I saw, combined with what I knew about Mezzofanti’s life from others, didn’t look like scale practicing. Okay, so maybe Mezzofanti wasn’t a virtuoso at harpsichord, guitar, and flute. But he’d be that much more entertaining on each instrument because you knew he could play the others—his flexibility in itself was a sort of virtuosity.
Take his poetry, for example. Scattered in the files, it’s mediocre at best—rote verse for ceremonial occasions. He wrote little scraps in English for visitors like Miss Hunter, Miss Haiselden, and Miss Lanveur. One read:
Dear god, hate sin
the world despise
then you begin
to be divinely wise.
Another one went like this:
Let mind be right, and heart be pure;
This, will good works ensure.
Good fruits come forth from a good tree:
God! give me such to be.
Prize-winning versi these weren’t; more eloquence comes out of fortune cookies. But he had to have a more than passing familiarity with the English code to be able to rhyme (despise/wise, pure/ensure) and keep sentences so brief. And to write in a style, and on appropriate topics, that resembled the edifying verse of the early Victorians, he’d have to know enough about English cultural sensibilities to key his poems to visitors’ upper-class tastes. Of course, he didn’t have the same sensibilities available to him in Chinese or Armenian, but must we cut them from his list of languages because they didn’t improve his poetry?
The next morning, I went to visit Franco Pasti, a Bolognese librarian and scholar who wrote A Polyglot in the Library (in Italian, Un poliglotta in biblioteca), about the period of Mezzofanti’s life between 1812 and 1831, when he worked as the librarian in the University of Bologna, until he was called to Rome. I was excited to meet Pasti—surely he must have insights into our shared obsession. He was a trim man sporting a gold bracelet and a crisp dress shirt, with the sly elegance of a ballroom dance instructor. “ Molto piacere,” I said. He looked surprised: “Piacere,” he replied. It was no great feat; I’d looked up the phrase that morning.
Do you want to see Mezzofanti’s library? he asked. Of course I did. Pasti escorted me to a long room with high vaulted ceilings and walls of books behind glass doors. At the head of the main hall sat a massive, dark wooden desk under a huge window, set like a shining eye overlooking the polished tables and chairs. At the time, Pasti whispered, they built libraries as temples for books. I could easily imagine Mezzofanti seated at his high altar, translating the heart of some text in snatched bits of time—he’d managed the library and its thirty thousand books with only one or two helpers. This work must have suited him—the library, famous for its collection of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, left him time to work on his languages.
By this point in his life, his reputation as a hyperpolyglot had taken on a life of its own. In 1817, the same year that Lord Byron stopped by, a Russian princess and a countess visited; so did a Croat, a Scotsman, French, Italians, scores of Americans and British people. Some wrote requesting his autograph. It was not as undignified as feeding the geek in a carnival sideshow, but this time in his life has the air of performance and spectacle—he was an entertaining freak. His biographies made much of his celebrity, which became concrete to me only when I saw the stacks of paper slips with the names and titles of his visitors. Born at a historical moment that put Bologna at a linguistic crossroads, Mezzofanti benefited from that access, then grew a reputation that amplified the effect. He became the crossroads.
As Pasti describes in his book, Mezzofanti also worked as theological enforcer. In the 1820s he translated Scripture from local vernaculars back into Latin, searching for the sources of heresies buried in the language. In one such translation, he’d read a translation of the New Testament in Persian that had been produced in Calcutta, read the Greek from which the Persian version was translated, compared the Persian to the Vulgate Latin original, then written an analysis in Latin and Italian.* I also found a note in English from an American woman, Deborah Emlen, who had rejected her Quaker beliefs and accepted the Roman Catholic creed; Mezzofanti translated this into Italian, probably for the sake of her Catholic fiancé’s family.
During the same period, he also patrolled customs to intercept books brought into the papal states and reviewed the wares of booksellers in the market. Unapproved or banned books with licentious or politically liberal ideas were confiscated and destroyed. This puts his attachment to Bologna and the Pope in a different light. Did he stay in Bologna because he loved it so much? Or was it because his conservatism might, in other parts of Europe, endanger his life? By 1831 he was in Rome, as much pushed there by political enemies in Bologna as beckoned by the needs of the Church.
Standing in the darkened temple to books, Pasti explained how little known Mezzofanti was in his hometown. True, there were well-placed mentions in travel memoirs. But in his own city, he had little renown beyond what he was awarded by high-ranking Church officials and the aristocratic families in whose libraries he had served. Pietro Giordani, the political revolutionary, acknowledged the oversight. Mezzofanti, he wrote, “deserves a wider fame than he enjoys, for the number of languages which he knows most perfectly, although this is the least part of his learning.” Even today, Pasti says, Mezzofanti is rarely acknowledged. There are the plaques on Via Malcontenti, and a street far from the city’s center named after him, but none of his anniversaries was ever celebrated.
In the archival manuscript room off the main reading room, a librarian sat at a desk while two researchers pored over books. Pasti pulled out the inventory of Mezzofanti’s library, which had been drawn up by a bookseller after his death. (Later I would find the original handwritten ledger that listed the cardinal’s estate at his death.) It’s famous, Pasti said, and it made some stupid mistakes identifying languages. But it helped the cardinal’s family get quite a sum of money from Pope Pio (Pius) IX, who then donated it to the University of Bologna library. The researchers scowled at us as we whispered to each other.
He also showed me a reproduction of the Codex Cospi, a parchment text made in pre-Columbian Mexico and transported to Bologna well before Mezzofanti’s time. The codex contains hundreds of glyphs that probably mark auspicious dates of the calendar. I had already seen Mezzofanti’s handwritten analysis of the codex, one of the first attempts to decipher it. Pasti said that until Mezzofanti correctly identified it as Mexican, it was called the “Chinese book.” Along with the codex analysis, I found in his papers a history of Arabic, a comparison of Swedish and German, and an attempt to translate the book of Genesis into Algonquin. The hyperpolyglot may not have published much, but it’s not completely accurate to call him a mindless church functionary or a mere parrot.
In the archives, I found versi that hinted at Mezzofanti’s experiences as a hyperpolyglot, offering a glimpse of a mind as human as it was powerful. Some of the versi were epigrams obviously written for various visitors. Most often they were blessings, prayers, or some exhortation to holiness, yet a few talked about la
nguages, fame, and God. Because the man wasn’t given to writing raw expressions of emotion, these versi are as close as one can come to actually seeing life from his point of view.
In some, he chides himself to be modest (and to the degree that he was perceived this way, he succeeded). As he reminded those who put him on a linguistic pedestal, speaking many languages wasn’t as impressive as holiness, service to God, and going to heaven. I like the notion of Mezzofanti telling his visitors not to focus on his polyglottism—even though that was likely the reason they’d come to see him in the first place. His humility about fame has a chaste appeal:
Why do you ask my name?
Why will you have it here
Where many names appear
illustrious, known to Fame.
But since you are so kind,
I write it, and remind:
what World offers is vain
Oh let us Heaven gain!
There was also this poem, which Mezzofanti wrote in Italian:
Of all the thousands of voices in various accents
that come from human breasts in hundreds of languages
the one that’s dearest to a virtuous and modest heart
is the voice that praises and extols the Creator.
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