Babel No More (2 page)
Authors: Michael Erard
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erard, Michael.
Babel no more : the search for the world’s most extraordinary language learners / Michael Erard.—1st Free Press hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Historical linguistics. I. Title.
P140.E73 2012
401’.93—dc23 2011027964
ISBN 978-1-4516-2825-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-2827-2 (eBook)
For Misty
Contents
Part 1
QUESTION: Into the Cardinal’s Labyrinth
Part 2
APPROACH: Tracking Down Hyperpolyglots
Part 3
REVELATION: The Brain Whispers
Part 4
ELABORATION: The Brains of Babel
Part 5
ARRIVAL: The Hyperpolyglot of Flanders
Catch a young swallow.
Roast her in honey.
Eat her up.
Then you will understand all languages.
—Folk magic incantation
When we wonder, we do not yet know
if we love or hate the object at which
we are marveling; we do not yet know
if we should embrace it or flee from it.
—Stephen Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions
Babel No More
Part 1
QUESTION:
Into the Cardinal’s Labyrinth
Introduction
T
o sea-going travelers of 1803, pirates in the Mediterranean posed a terrifyingly reliable threat. So when an Italian priest, Felix Caronni, set out from the Sicilian port of Palermo, it was conceivable that neither he nor the ship’s cargo of oranges would ever see their destination. Indeed, Caronni’s boat was captured, and for a year he was jailed on the northern coast of Africa,
headed for certain slavery, until French diplomats secured his release.
When the priest returned to Italy, he set out to write an account of his narrow escape. Appearing in 1806, it was the first published mention of a certain professor of Oriental languages at the University of Bologna who had helped Caronni translate a document from Arabic. This twenty-nine-year-old professor, Giuseppe Mezzofanti,
a priest and the son of a local Bolognese carpenter, was reputed to know twenty-four languages.
More than thirty years later, a group of English tourists visiting Rome sought out Mezzofanti and asked him how many languages he spoke. By then he was the Vatican librarian and would soon be elevated to cardinal. “I have heard many different accounts,” one tourist asked the prelate, “but will you
tell me yourself?”
Mezzofanti hesitated. “Well, if you must know, I speak forty-five languages.”
“Forty-five!” the tourist exclaimed. “How, sir, have you possibly contrived to acquire so many?”
“I cannot explain it,” said Mezzofanti. “Of course God has given me this peculiar power: but if you wish to know how I preserve these languages, I can only say, that, when once I hear the meaning of
a word in any language, I never forget it.”
Engraving of Giuseppe Mezzofanti.
At other times, when asked how many languages he spoke, Mezzofanti liked to quip that he knew “fifty languages and Bolognese.” During his lifetime, he put enough of those fifty on display—among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French,
German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian—that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithridates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual
cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking
polyglott, and more,—who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.” Newspapers described him as “the distinguished linguist,” “the most learned linguist now living,” “the most accomplished linguist ever seen,” “the greatest linguist of modern
Europe.” He was continually referred to as the pinnacle of human achievement with languages. A British civil servant who directed a survey of all the languages of India between 1894 and 1928 summed up the linguistic situation in the province of Assam, where eighty-one languages were spoken, by writing that “Mezzofanti himself, who spoke fifty-eight languages, would have been puzzled here.”
In
1820, Hungarian astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach visited Mezzofanti, who addressed him in Hungarian so excellent, the surprised Baron said he felt “stupefied.” Then (as he wrote later), “he afterwards spoke to me in German, at first in good Saxon, and then in the Austrian and Swabian dialects, with a correctness of accent that amazed me to the last degree.” Mezzofanti went on to speak English
in conversation with a visiting Englishman, and Russian and Polish with a visiting Russian prince. He did all of this, wrote Zach, “not stuttering and stammering, but with the same volubility as if he had been speaking his mother tongue.”
Despite this adoration, Mezzofanti was also the target of sarcastic barbs. Irish writer Charles Lever wrote that Mezzofanti “was a most inferior man. . . .
An old dictionary would have been to the full as companionable.” Baron Bunsen, a German philologist, said that in all the countless languages which Mezzofanti spoke he “never said anything.” He “has not five ideas,” said a Roman priest quoted in a memoir. A German student who met him in the Vatican remembered, “There is something about him that reminds me of a parrot—he does not seem to abound in
ideas.”
A Hungarian woman visiting him in 1841 asked how many languages he spoke.
“Not many,” Mezzofanti replied. “For I only speak forty or fifty.”
“Amazing incomprehensible faculty!” the woman, Mrs. Polyxena Paget, wrote in a recollection, “but not one that I should in the least be tempted to envy; for the empty unreflecting word-knowledge, and the innocently exhibited small vanity with which
he was filled, reminded
me rather of a monkey or a parrot, a talking machine, or a sort of organ wound up for the performance of certain tunes, than of a being endowed with reason.”
Yet many others were unburdened of their skepticism when they encountered the man in the flesh. Scholars, philologists, and classicists trooped off to test or trap Mezzofanti and were, one by one, bested and charmed.
In 1813, a scholar from the University of Turin, Carlo Boucheron, met Mezzofanti at the Library of Pisa, armed with hard questions about Latin. Expecting that Mezzofanti had spread himself too thin to know anything substantial about the arcana of Latin’s history, Boucheron had called him a “mere literary charlatan.”
“Well,” Boucheron was asked several hours later, “what do you think of Mezzofanti?”
“By Bacchus!” Boucheron exclaimed. “He is the Devil!”
Mezzofanti himself, humble about his gifts, said that God had given him a good memory and a quick ear. “What am I,” he used to say, “but an ill-bound dictionary.”
On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765–1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt
before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him “each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.” Mezzofanti didn’t flinch but “took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.” The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could
not be bested.
All that was left was for Mezzofanti to ascend to heaven, where the angels might discover, to their glittering surprise, that he spoke the angelic tongue, too.
Chapter 1
A
typical midtown Manhattan lunch crowd was packed into the Japanese restaurant around me. Behind the counter were the cooks who had produced the fragrant bowl of noodles I was now eating.
The boss, an older Japanese man, read from waiters’ slips and shouted orders to his crew in Japanese. Two heavy-set, young Hispanic men, with tattooed arms and baseball hats worn backward, moved from
pot to pot through the steam-filled space, ladling this, mixing that, all so smoothly I couldn’t tell when they had finished one order and started another. In the quieter moments, they filled containers with chopped herbs and wiped down counters, talking to one another in Spanish and addressing a third cook, another Japanese man, in the pidgin English of the restaurant kitchen.
Three languages,
two of which weren’t native to the people speaking them, and the rhythm of their immaculate noodle ballet never stuck or slowed.
It’s amazing that the world runs so well, given that people use languages that they didn’t grow up using, haven’t studied in schools, and in which they’ve never been tested or certified. Yet it does. The noodle scene was probably reflected that same day hundreds of
millions of times all over the world, in markets, restaurants, taxis, airports, shops,
docks, classrooms, and streets, where men, women, and children of all skin colors and nationalities met with, ate with, bought and sold with, flirted with, boarded with, worked next to, served, introduced, greeted, cursed at, and asked directions from others who didn’t speak their language. They did all this
successfully, even though they might have spoken with accents, used simple words, made mistakes, paraphrased, and done other things that marked them as linguistic outsiders. Such encounters between non-native speakers have always textured human experience. In our era, these encounters are peaking, as the ties between language and geography have been weakened by migration, global business, cheap travel,
cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet.
You may be familiar with the stories of languages, such as English or French or Latin, that are (or were) valuable cultural capital. This book tells another story, about a kind of cognitive capital, the stuff you bring to learning a new language.
We once lived in bubbles, disconnected from the hubbub of the world. But more of these bubbles, where
one or only a few languages used to be spoken, are connected each day, and more and more of us are passing between them. It is clear that multilingual niches are proliferating, and that monolinguals (such as myself) need to live and act multilingually. But that’s not what I’m writing about.