Babel No More

by Michael Erard

  Perhaps because he’d staked his sense of self on languages, his ego, vulnerable to accolades and attention, needed dampening.

  As I was leaving the library’s main doors, Pasti turned to me to say that he doubted Mezzofanti’s skills. This surprised me. In his book, he hadn’t probed Mezzofanti’s reputation with any skepticism. Now he was telling me that back then, the standards for what it meant to speak or know a language were “very low.” “I don’t think he actually spoke Persian or Arabic.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, hoping he’d uncovered some damning evidence.

  He shrugged. “Just a feeling,” he said.

  Knowing I might never visit the archives again, I had hit on a solution to get at Mezzofanti’s proficiency: I’d count the letters he received in each language. If he got many, he must have been writing a lot, and that, maybe, pointed to a great deal of practice, then to a high degree of proficiency. It was a fair social science hypothesis.

  I told Pasti about my plan. The librarian smirked at me.

  “You are a positivist, I think,” he said. A positivist is someone who believes you can get at truths only through what can be counted, measured, and observed. I was shocked—I’ve been called names before, but never that. Pasti had interpreted Mezzofanti’s life, leaving tabulation to people like me. With a grin, the librarian punched my arm lightly.

  “I have to leave Bologna with some hard facts about Mezzofanti,” I said. “People are going to expect me to come up with a hard answer. I just can’t give them more anecdotes.”

  Pasti’s smile was unforgiving. “That proves it,” he said. “You are a positivist.”

  Back in the Archiginnasio, I slumped at the table with an unopened box and the inventario in front of me. Pasti wasn’t the first person to discourage me about Mezzofanti’s true nature. And he wouldn’t be the last. Maybe he didn’t quite understand my desperate desire for a visual encounter with the hyperpolyglot, if not in flesh, then in fact.

  One thing was clear: I could stay in Bologna until my Italian was molto perfetto, and the truth about the hyperpolyglot would elude me.

  I departed Bologna with one intact conclusion: Mezzofanti learned and used numerous languages in a range of ways.

  Given the rich purpose evident in those boxes, I was entirely willing to extend to his legacy the notion that those uses were real and meaningful. Even if many of them were narrow, they were his, no less legitimate for being idiosyncratic. I also felt certain that the languages weren’t objects of beauty that he displayed like butterflies in a collection. Though I couldn’t read most of the languages, the artifacts indicated that he used them. Maybe not all at the same time—some he might have kept on the back burner. To my eye, at least, they looked like tools. Some of what he used languages for clearly involved high-stakes communications. Some of it was the equivalent of a verbal amuse-bouche. Some of it was memorized chitchat (“Will you visit the Pope in Rome?”) for social lubrication. His abilities may have been less than perfect or fluent or native-like. That patchwork quality was something I would find to be common among hyperpolyglots.

  My skepticism eroded on another front, as well. Without some kind of mental gift, Mezzofanti couldn’t have made so much—even half as much as was claimed—of the language encounters that he sought. After all, many people live at linguistic crossroads where they can be immersed in many languages; some may even love languages. Yet very few become hyperpolyglots. Moving forward, one crucial dimension of my search had to be to characterize, as best I could, the mental powers that he and other hyperpolyglots brought to bear on language learning.

  I also recognized that his linguistic patchwork reflected a level of brainwork that wouldn’t be captured in a single number representing the languages he spoke, read, or translated. One skepticism I was willing to jettison: disqualifying someone solely because they had a large number of languages associated with their name. Other things could disqualify them, I vowed. Not the number of languages. (Nor could it qualify them, but more about that later.) I also vowed that I wouldn’t look at people with an “all or nothing” eye but only a “something and something” one. Among other things, this meant that individuals could be interesting even if they weren’t native-like in all their languages.

  I left with the belief that Mezzofanti did things with languages that the people who speak them natively would never do. Topping the list was his ability to rapidly analyze languages and his prodigious memory (as evidenced by performance and his own claims); an apparent ability to mimic speech sounds that weren’t native to him; and an ability to switch among his languages without interference. These are unique skills; monolingual native speakers don’t necessarily have them, and, except for the language switching, neither do bilinguals. The native speaker wasn’t the hyperpolyglot’s twin, joined in comparisons; someone else would have to take that role.

  Mezzofanti’s time and place seemed distant and inaccessible. But was he truly one of a kind, the only member of his species? Or could others like him be living among us now?

  Part 2

  APPROACH:

  Tracking Down Hyperpolyglots

  Chapter 5

  Nearing retirement, Dick Hudson, a linguist at University College, London, took up an overlooked query: Who had learned the most languages ever? In the mid-1990s, he sent this question to LINGUIST List, a popular forum with language scientists. A flurry of postings listed the names of well-known hyperpolyglots of yesteryear, including Giuseppe Mezzofanti. Others cast doubts that the upper limit for languages would be very high. For all purposes, it remained an open question, a natural experiment whose results had never been analyzed.

  A couple of years later, he received an email that began like this: “Sir, First, let me apologize for bothering you, but I saw an article you wrote and had to write.” The writer, N., had found Hudson’s posting and wanted to describe how his grandfather, a Sicilian with no formal schooling, had learned languages with such remarkable ease that by the end of his life he could speak seventy, as well as read and write in fifty-six.* This grandfather was twenty when he moved to New York in the 1910s. There he found a job as a railroad porter, which brought him into contact with travelers who spoke many different languages. N. said he once watched his grandfather translate a newspaper into three languages on the spot.

  When N. was ten years old, in the 1950s, he accompanied his grandfather on a six-month world cruise. Whatever port they called at, N. said his grandfather knew the local language. Their trip took them to Venezuela, Argentina, Norway, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan. Assuming the grandfather spoke the local language at each port, one can figure that he knew some of at least seventeen (including English)—though there was no mention of what he could accomplish in each.

  Even more amazingly, N. claimed that this talent ran in his family. “Every three or four generations there is a member of my family who has the ability to learn many languages,” he wrote. His grandfather once told N. that his own father and great-uncle could speak more than one hundred languages.

  When Hudson read this, its significance was crystal clear. Studying the genetic basis of abilities in language, especially the heritability of language disorders, is cutting-edge territory. In the 1990s, exciting work was performed on a family with developmental language problems who had the same mutated gene. Could there be a genetic link for exceptional abilities? Perhaps a hyperpolyglot gene?

  With N.’s permission, Hudson passed the mail on to LINGUIST. Seeing a need for a better label for people who learn lots of languages, Hudson chose hyperpolyglot. Multilingual didn’t cut it; polyglot felt too pedestrian. A hyperpolyglot, in Hudson’s terms, was a person who could speak six or more languages. Hudson had found that community-based multilingualism, where everyone, not just special individuals, spoke many languages, had a ceiling of five languages. So some
one who spoke six or more had to be exceptional, Hudson reasoned. They weren’t just polyglots, they were hyperpolyglots.

  Hyperpolyglots caught Hudson’s attention because they were beyond the pale of linguistic theory. With only one exception that he knew of—the study of a severely mentally impaired man named Christopher who knew twenty languages—no one had ever addressed the issue. No longer a professor affiliated with an institution, Hudson had nothing to lose by following up a fascinating but ignored phenomenon, though N. disappeared shortly after his letter was published.

  If you believe that language is innate and uniquely human, then the question about how many languages a person can learn would seem trivial. Learning one language is itself an evolutionary marvel; learning many of them, well, that’s gilding the lily. A language superlearner deserves about the same attention as an ultramarathon runner—accolades and respect for pushing basic human equipment to an extreme, but not the scientific interest you’d give to, say, a human who could breathe underwater or flap his arms and fly.

  If pushed to explain the hyperpolyglot phenomenon, an innatist might say that every baby’s brain comes equipped with a primordial universal grammar, a sort of periodic table that contains the basic properties of all the world’s languages and all the dimensions along which they differ. Coming into contact with a real language (or several) triggers some properties from that table. The ones left untriggered disappear. Because all the languages on the planet differ along a finite number of dimensions, even an adult should be able to retrigger these properties and their permutations, given enough time. Theoretically, there should be no limits on how many languages a person could learn. If most people don’t, it’s because they’d rather carve whalebone, grow the perfect orchid, or sit on the beach.

  Those of an opposing theoretical bent, the emergentists, see language not as inborn but as a behavior that grows out of a set of simpler, overlapping cognitive skills. At certain moments in a child’s development, such skills are enhanced by experiences that bootstrap them to a higher level of complexity. In this account, protogrammars don’t have to exist in babies’ brains—as expert learners, humans can fill in gaps from their environment. Accordingly, an emergentist’s explanation of the hyperpolyglot goes something like this: people with a gift for learning languages must recognize and parse patterns extremely well. Surely this makes a kind of intuitive sense. But here the account stalls. At what point does parsing patterns become knowing a language? And how can you escape the influence of your earliest language—or harness your knowledge of it—to become fluent in later ones?

  Meanwhile, the applied side of linguistics, which deals with foreign-language education and literacy, developed the notion of language-learning “aptitude.” It was really a measure of how quickly a student could achieve proficiency in an extra language in an allotted time period. As the concept was first developed in the 1950s, aptitude had four dimensions—how well a person can recall sounds; how sensitive she is to grammatical patterns; how well she can produce new sentences based on what she analyzes; and how well she learns how words in the first and second languages connect. Later, the notion evolved, adding new understandings of how memory works.

  But aptitude was never applied to hyperpolyglottery. The bulk of research on aptitude had been done by the bureaucrats of the foreign-language education establishment in Washington, D.C. (and other capitals), where the typical learner of interest was an adult who’d mastered one language well enough for spycraft and diplomacy. The massively multilingual person? Barely interesting.

  Even if hyperpolyglots had been examined through the lens of aptitude, the concept had shortcomings. For instance, standardized tests of aptitude tend to predict a student’s grades in certain kinds of classrooms better than they predict real-world language use. They also don’t predict how adept a person could ultimately become in a language—high aptitude is no guarantee that abilities won’t peak quickly. More important, there’s no agreement on what aptitude is made of, how much it can be cultivated, and how much is inborn. Aptitude could make for a potent political time bomb in many educational settings. Holding out high aptitude implies low aptitude, which, in turn, implies the promise of handing out educational resources on an unequal basis. If the aptitudes you find striking happen to correspond with certain genders, races, or classes, then you’d look as if you were cementing old privileges. It’s safer to assume that all students possess a generic cognitive profile and teach them with fitting uniformity.

  Hudson was stymied. Even if the feats of successful language learners are no longer explained through mystical sources—whether visits from angels or pacts with demons—we can’t ignore how some people are faster learners and better users of their languages. Perhaps they can read shades of meaning more acutely, even mimicking sounds more exactly. Some of these people, who are on the high end of a normal curve, count as experts. Yet others go far, far beyond this. How to explain this?

  As he told me in a series of exchanges by email and phone, Hudson himself worked hard to learn various languages before traveling to the places they were spoken. He’d put in the required time on task. Yet after coming home, he found that his abilities rapidly and inevitably dwindled. Others learned faster and kept their knowledge longer than he did. How did hyperpolyglots retain their skills? Could average language learners do the same?

  Hudson was also alarmed by a negative trend in foreign-language education in Britain. Politicians lectured Britons on learning languages so they could get jobs in the European Union, while universities removed foreign-language requirements and shut down language departments when enrollments dropped. Further, the government was constantly exporting English teachers, textbooks, courses, and programs, helping the country to earn £1.3 billion a year. In other words, learning languages was for citizens of other countries—who would then compete with Britons for jobs. The irony was underscored by the fact that by 2005, immigrants had transformed London into a place where at least 307 languages are spoken, making the capital of one of the most monolingual countries in the European Union the most multilingual city on the planet. A new approach to foreign-language education was direly needed.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, a long-documented shortage of language analysts in US intelligence agencies meant that evidence of an imminent terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, sat undiscovered in a queue until much too late. As it plotted its counterterrorism strategy, the US government was in a bind: unwilling to trust intelligence work to recent immigrants (especially ones from the same cultural groups that al-Qaeda drew from), the national fear of anything foreign had long snuffed out the immigrant-family languages it now desperately needed for a range of government functions. Coupled with a peacetime vacuum of political will to build a linguistically expert workforce, these trends, some of which dated back decades, ruined some of the country’s greatest human resources: linguistic fluency and cultural knowledge. Experts had long warned of such a shortage; in 1980, Senator Paul Simon published a searing jeremiad, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis. Yet the necessary funding for something as intangible as language could be mobilized only by a crisis.

  The problems ran much deeper, though. Failing to produce enough language experts for government and business was considered the fault of the educational system. Yet success in language learning, whenever it occurred, was seen as the product of intense self-fashioning; it was, by and large, an individual’s project. Such a view threw up barriers to connecting teachers and learners in ways that would make their efforts sustainable and promote brain plasticity. It also voided any legitimate role for government, which would be the prime beneficiary of expanded linguistic skills. The result was a profound inability to go about building more cognitive capital in the society around foreign-language learning.

  As Hudson saw it, cultural blindness, social inertia, and political inaction stood in the way of the language learning that the British and the Americans needed to do. Perhaps the
way forward could be found in the methods or gifts of high-performing language learners, Hudson thought. They’re the Olympic athletes of languages. “If we understood how the gold medalists got their talent,” he told me, “then we might know better how to teach ordinary people to speak more languages.”

  Was this true? He’d have to meet some gold medalists to find out.

  Chapter 6

  Every so often over the next several years, Hudson emailed me the name of another hyperpolyglot. Have you ever heard of Harold Williams? I’d write him back: I have (Williams was a New Zealand journalist, said to know fifty-eight languages.) What about George Campbell? Yes, he was a scholar from Scotland who could “speak and write fluently in at least 44 languages and had a working knowledge of perhaps 20 others,” read his Washington Post obituary.

  One drawback loomed: Hudson couldn’t hook me up with a real, living hyperpolyglot—he’d never met one. And in that, we were equal. At the time, little information about them had shown up online. Now you can easily go to YouTube and find videos of people rattling off messages in eight or ten languages, but when I began my research, I could only hope that such virtual communities existed, and the Wikipedia entries on famous polyglots hadn’t yet been written, squabbled over, or removed.

  A recurring frustration was that the modern scientific literature was nearly silent on the topic, except in decades-old studies about how trauma or disease in the brain damages a person’s ability in one or more of their spoken languages. The best example, an article by an A. Leischner from 1948, originally in German, references Georg Sauerwein (1831–1904), a German who apparently could speak and write twenty-six languages (though “otherwise he was rather untalented,” Leischner quipped). Others Leischner called “very talented.” He was trying to understand the principles that ordered languages in a person’s brain by seeing which languages were affected by strokes. It seemed hyperpolyglots were most interesting when they were no longer so.