For a sense of what Mezzofanti was doing, one can look at what ordinary multilinguals do when they switch between languages. One theory says that they don’t switch languages on and off; rather, they have them all mentally activated at the same time, but put a lid on the unwanted ones. It’s the equivalent of turning on all the lights in the house, but covering up the bulbs you don’t want to shine. A speaker has to do two things: stop the response in one language, then initiate a response in the other one. A friend of mine who grew up with English, French, and Spanish said that even if only one language is coming out of his mouth, he feels as if he’s speaking them all at the same time. The trick of the polyglot has a contradiction at its heart: to say something, many things must also go unsaid. This might explain why someone like Lomb Kató could have only five languages simultaneously. It’s not that she couldn’t keep more than those activated; it’s that she couldn’t keep more than those deactivated.
This switching mechanism is what enables interpreters to move between languages so rapidly. It also helps bilinguals insert words or phrases from one language into utterances of another, or code-switch. Fluent speakers can switch within sentences, flipping between languages without violating the grammar of either one, a process that requires some powerful neural hardware.
Switching between tasks—or languages—is the central job of something called executive function. This is a group of cognitive skills that give a person the ability to manage and focus on a task. Think of executive function as how you control your mental airspace—how many planes you have in the air, how many are landing, how much room you have in your airport. Working memory, as Helen described it, is an important component of executive function.
Scientists know that mental airspace control is located in the prefrontal cortex, but they know very little about where language switching takes place. An area called the posterior parietal cortex was once nominated to be a “language talent” area of the brain, and it was believed that this area had something to do with switching. Someone with damage to this area would sound like a patient known as HB, an eighty-year-old man observed by the neurologist Ellen Perecman. After a car accident caused bleeding in his brain, the recovering HB rattled on, fluently, about nothing. Most strikingly, he mixed up German (his mother tongue), French (a second language), and English (which he learned as an immigrant to the United States). The doctor asked him why he was in the hospital, to which he replied, “Eine sprache to andern [to change a language], you speak a language that comes to you.” Many of his utterances were polyglot salads, such as “Vorständig thickheaded” and “Standing that means ständig ständig führen stein.”
The idea of a “language talent” area didn’t work out. So whether switching is controlled in some other specific place or more broadly, a healthy multilingual person can switch between languages voluntarily. Doing so for the purposes of translation, as in a courtroom, is a skill to be learned and honed. But if someone could have a superior facility for switching, would that person behave like a Mezzofanti? Could they, for instance, switch among more languages, which would mean having more of them active at once?
A bilingual person is, in essence, a linguistic multitasker. As a result, he has more powerful executive function skills. Children who speak two languages test higher on executive function skills than do their peers with one language. Presumably, it’s because their brains are constantly juggling languages, selecting one and inhibiting the other. On simple tests, bilingual and monolingual adults perform at the same level, yet lifelong bilinguals always do better when their executive function is truly challenged. Scientists also speculate that a lifetime of living with two languages may protect people from the effects of cognitive aging—the constant exercise working memory, focus, and inhibition builds up a “reserve” that people carry into older age. One doesn’t have to be a Mezzofanti to see such benefits, either.
In Bologna I’d ruminated on the case of Mezzofanti, a man who had escaped some elemental linguistic curse by taking advantage of his unique circumstances and, most likely, drawing on something hardwired in his brain which wasn’t just memory. Mezzofanti was a myth, Erik Gunnemark hissed. I didn’t agree—sure, the size of his repertoire may have been inflated, but who really knew? Science had relegated him to a dusty cabinet of curiosities; no one had looked as seriously at him as I confidently thought I could, bring proficiency tests, institutional scales, and other metrics for judging language proficiency. The tests, I found, didn’t suit the evidence. And the cobwebby evidence was incomplete. The only solution was to interrogate a live person.
Thinking I would meet a pop culture polyglot, I found instead Alexander, a man who practices the polyglottish lifestyle that he preaches. Alexander doesn’t pursue oral communication, though he could say a lot of things in his languages. Once, to humor me, he logged on to Skype with a fellow language aficionado and had a conversation that switched from English to Russian to Korean to Arabic. Mostly, he reads. He criticizes the modern language-learning paradigm of shopping, migration, and tourism that artist Rainer Ganahl identifies as characteristic of our era. Instead, he longs to learn languages for the reasons that drove monks and philologists centuries ago, a semimystical desire to touch the origins of literary texts. It dates, he said, from adolescence. He read many authors in translation, but “felt even then that I was not doing them justice,” he told me. “For I seem to have an ingrained dictum that if something is worth reading, then it is worth reading as the author wrote it.”
I, too, desired an encounter with some harder proof of his proficiency than a library of books, but he declined to have his proficiency or his aptitude tested. No scientific test can capture his experiences, he said. I brought it up a few times, then dropped it. I figured I could find someone else to test.
Alexander and Helen are both very good at managing the filters their native language makes them hurdle when they are learning new sounds and words; it was harder for me to tell how well they could deal with the word orders of new languages, which had also stumped Christopher. Believing that language learning isn’t easy and takes work, they commit themselves to using their time efficiently. With a balance of motivation and aptitude, they know how they learn and how languages tend to work. That demonstration of expertise—something they’d undoubtedly achieved after lots of hard work—might, in some people’s thinking, make some organic advantage unnecessary. After all, there were tragic turns in their lives that languages assuaged. In addition to Alexander and Helen, Ken Hale had suffered the extended illness of a sibling and the turning away of parental attention. Even Elihu Burritt, the Yankee polyglot, appeared to take up languages partly to compete with his deeply loved older brother, partly to grieve when his brother succumbed to fever in Texas.
Yet I couldn’t escape the sense that Alexander and Helen and all the others were somehow beyond expertise. Experts who hadn’t sought expertise. They loved languages, not as a writer or poet loves a turn of phrase, a way of making meter or rhyme; they loved them as objects—or, rather, they loved the encounters, both occasional and sustained, with those objects. Does the expert surgeon love the scalpel and the tissues it parts? Does the expert programmer love the code?
There was also the way they persisted, despite social isolation and economic hardship (more so in Alexander’s case). True, they seemed sustained by pride. What else? It wasn’t money or achievement they were after. Burritt had described his achievements to an admirer as the result of a “plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap—particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.” Why would Burritt have submitted to anthood if he didn’t find some pleasure in it? By “pleasure,” I mean the thrill their neurological systems get when they put sentences together, parse sounds, choose words. I mentioned this to someone, who laughed and asked, isn’t all pleasure neurological? Sure, I replied. Anyone who learns another language or two has to appreciate this at some level. And the hyperpolyglots, they really seek it out
. I think the usual way to make sense of this is to say, of course they enjoy it, they’re good at it. But this seemed backward to me. Why not acknowledge an inherent pleasure that initiates the journey to success?
I found one answer in the work of Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, who works with exceptionally artistic children. She identified one of their attributes as a “rage to master.” This is, she says, the drive to immerse one’s self in a particular area because one enjoys both the cognitive problems it poses and the experience of solving them. In Winner’s formulation, one doesn’t develop expertise because one works hard; one works hard at tasks that one finds rewarding, causing expertise to emerge, over time.
As Winner argues, precocity and talent have an innate, biological component. Even if you can’t locate them precisely in the brain—after all, only a few of the really complex cognitive processes can be located this way—that doesn’t mean these differences don’t exist. Artistically talented children learn more rapidly than others; they make their own discoveries, without much help from adults; and they do things that ordinary artists their own age don’t do. For example, their drawings are more realistic and reproduce volume and relative size more accurately than those of their normal peers, even if all of them have had the same amount of explicit instruction. Most important, as Winner puts it, is that “they are intrinsically motivated to acquire skill in the domain (because of the ease with which learning occurs).”
Does the structure of the hyperpolyglot brain give its owner a boost? Do these people use neural circuits more efficiently, or create more of these circuits than other people? Maybe their sleep consolidates their long-term memories more effectively. Maybe their bodies produce more neurotransmitters, or are more sensitive to them. Contemporary knowledge about the brain offered any number of possibilities. Alexander and Helen had hyperpolyglot brains worth looking at, but they were still using them. Perhaps a brain preserved in a jar would provide suitable answers.
And the good news was, I had just found one.
Part 3
REVELATION:
The Brain Whispers
Chapter 10
In May of 1917, Emil Krebs, a German diplomat and hyperpolyglot, arrived in San Francisco with his wife, Amande, and her two daughters. Known to be a cranky, unpleasant person, he ranted about the storm clouds of war that greeted them. For the last two months, they’d been on a Dutch steamer escaping from China, where he’d been posted. Eastbound on the steamer, they heard via radio that the United States had declared war on Germany. He might have feared that when they landed, they would become prisoners of war, but a diplomatic deal was arranged: the family could journey to the East Coast to catch a ship to Europe, but they would have to travel in a sealed train car across the United States. No visitors, no exits, not even windows, for an entire week. Which was fine—bookish Krebs had his whole library with him and probably would have paid little attention to the rugged landscape unrolling before his eyes.
He was a man with many languages traveling across a country that was on its own journey to having only English. The United States was in the middle of a transformation from a proud, mostly tolerant polyglot land to a xenophobic, English-speaking one—a change that found its final hastening in the very conflict between the United States and the government of Kaiser William II that Krebs represented.
Had Krebs toured San Francisco, where several generations of Chinese speakers lived, he could have conversed in the many languages from China, his specialty. Krebs didn’t know any indigenous American languages, which once numbered in the many dozens in California, making it for a time one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. Linguists now figure that as late as 1800, more than 100 languages were spoken in the area that would become the state. In fact, when Europeans arrived in the Americas, the northern and southern continents contained half of the entire world’s linguistic diversity, an estimated 1,800 languages in all.
As the train crossed the Midwest, it went through towns and cities full of Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Pennsylvania Dutch, Polish, Italians, Greeks, living their lives in their native tongues, publishing newspapers, educating their children, going to church—and eventually learning English. In 1910, there were 13 million white immigrants over the age of ten in the United States. Most spoke English, German, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, or Swedish as a mother tongue; and 23 percent of the population reported that they couldn’t speak English at all. (The number wouldn’t be this high again until 1990, when 26 percent reported not speaking English well or at all.) Native Americans had been forcibly educated in English since the 1870s and even earlier, but the sounds of proud immigrant cultures were just now being silenced.
In the throes of anti-German mania after the declaration of war, American patriots outlawed the teaching of the German language, regulated German newspapers, and burned German books. In South Dakota and Iowa, the governors proclaimed that it was illegal to speak any language but English over the telephone or in public places. Children took oaths of loyalty to English. In 1910, 433 German-language newspapers were published every week; by 1960, the number had fallen to 29.
Had Krebs known about disappearing languages in the country he was crossing, as a language lover, he might have mourned their loss. Like Mezzofanti, he was a carpenter’s child, and similarly, his passion for languages launched itself. Somewhere he found an old French newspaper, and two weeks after a teacher gave him a French dictionary, he showed up at the teacher’s desk speaking French. No parent as a model. No multilingual community. He simply bent toward foreign languages as a sunflower leans to find the sun.
By the end of high school, he is said to have spoken twelve of them. After law school, he went to the Foreign Office school for interpreters in Berlin and was asked which language he wanted to study. By then, he had studied Latin, Greek, French, and Hebrew in school, and Modern Greek, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Arabic, and Turkish on his own. I want to learn all of them, he replied.
You can’t learn them all, he was told.
“Okay,” Krebs reportedly said. “I want to learn the hardest one.”
That was Mandarin Chinese. He began Chinese courses in 1887 and took (and passed) his first exam in 1890. In 1893, he became a diplomatic translator for the growing German presence in the Chinese cities of Tsingtao and Beijing, and took two further exams in 1894 and 1895, receiving the rating of “good.” By 1901, he’d risen to the rank of chief interpreter. There his language abilities brought him literally to the seat of Chinese imperial power.
One day, an exacting Chinese imperial official inquired who in the German legation was writing such elegant Chinese documents. It was Krebs. From then on, the Empress Dowager Cixi often invited him for tea, which they drank out of translucent porcelain cups. She “preferred to converse with him as the most careful and best Chinese speaker among the foreigners.” Chinese authorities asked him questions about the languages in their realm (Chinese, Mongolian, Manchurian, Tibetan)—because they had no tradition of polyglottery, they wouldn’t have known these languages themselves. One story told about Krebs is that Chinese officials, unable to read a letter sent from a rebel Mongolian tribe, asked Krebs to translate it.
“Throughout Chinese history,” said Victor Mair, a Sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “practically the only Chinese who learned Sanskrit were a few monks who actually traveled to India and stayed there for an extended period of time. Merchants and others (e.g., some officials who traveled widely within China) learned several Sinitic languages (so-called ‘dialects’) in the various places where they went. There was no interest in learning other languages out of sheer intellectual or linguistic curiosity.” Steven Owen, a Harvard professor of Chinese literature, added that some of the Chinese population learned Manchu when the Qing ruled China (from 1644 to 1911), but that they were specialists working for the emperor.
“As an intellectual endeavor,” Owen said, “meaning learning languages that are n
ot proximate or needed, with an attendant interest in the culture—I don’t know of any cases among the educated [Chinese] elite before modern times.”
One reason was most certainly cultural. In the West, polyglottery had its earliest roots in Christianity, which was, from the start, an evangelical religion with no single language (Jesus himself spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, and maybe Greek) and whose central text was propagated in many languages. Polyglottery also stemmed from European exploration, colonization, and empire building. By contrast, in China, the main pursuit of the intellectual class for thousands of years had been trying to either join or rise up in the civil service. This required such extensive literacy—being able to read and write upward of one hundred thousand characters—little time was left for much else. Moreover, the one writing system itself linked intellectual cultures across time and space in a way that, in the West, required fluency in many languages. Perhaps most significantly, the Chinese perceived themselves to be the center of the world, so they could hardly be expected to learn barbarian languages. The barbarians should first learn some Chinese.
One shouldn’t think that the hyperpolyglot is uniquely Western, however. I was connected with a historical document from sixteenth-century Java which outlined the responsibilities of someone called “the Polyglot,” who was a real or imagined figure in the royal court’s intelligentsia. The Polyglot held linguistic knowledge of all the communities in the Indian Ocean world that Sundanese traders might contact, as well as “all other kinds of foreign lands.” Exactly what sort of abilities this Polyglot had in all those languages (and there were nearly five dozen of them) isn’t known. But as linguist Benjamin Zimmer noted in his fascinating analysis of this document, it provides “a striking example of the linguistic outward-lookingness that has pervaded the Indian Ocean world” for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Exactly the time and place where a hyperpolyglot would have flourished, in other words.
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