Authors: Michael Erard
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 intelligent 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.
But their fractiousness is superficial. Neither scholar doubted Mezzofanti’s achievement or its glory, and, interestingly, neither one invoked
the divine (angels, tongues of fire) to explain his gifts, not even Russell, for whom Mezzofanti’s figure carried a religious charge. More significant, they both agreed that Mezzofanti had mastered thirty languages.
Mastered them.
Despite Russell’s careful accounting and Watts’s surgical follow-up, disentangling Mezzofanti from folk legend and the preoccupations of his contemporaries is far from
straightforward. It’s not only a matter of how you define what it means to speak a language; it also matters who does the listening.
We commonly assume that native speakers are qualified to judge how well someone uses their language. But their opinions of another’s mastery can take a cultural coloring. In Bologna, Italians welcomed my small attempts with praise, as have Mexicans and Colombians
with Spanish. In Taiwan and China, people responded to my elementary abilities with polite enthusiasm: “Oh, you speak Chinese very well!” “Really,
you don’t have to be so polite,” I’d reply in Chinese. I took the titters of shocked delight to mean that the sophistication of the reply (which I’d learned from a friend) had outstripped their true opinion of my skill.
By contrast, the French are
vehemently uninterested in having a foreigner mangle their language—in stereotype, anyway. Theoretically, French natives would rate you lower in French than Spaniards would in Spanish. In Japan and Korea, a lower-skilled non-native will be highly regarded and praised, while someone with better skills will be viewed as a threat. Former US ambassador William Rugh, who was posted to Yemen and the United
Arab Emirates, once counseled that if you’re a non-native Arabic speaker appearing on Arabic-language media, it’s better to keep a conversation going than to worry about being grammatically correct; the effort, which is appreciated by Arab audiences, looks good diplomatically. For cultural reasons, Arab audiences also prefer truthful speech, so they are more tolerant of imperfect Arabic than of
an interpreter, who may alter what a person means. So various are all these responses that you’d have to conclude that a native speaker’s opinion isn’t necessarily a legitimate criterion.
An even bigger problem is that one person’s “nativeness” in language X isn’t necessarily the same as another’s. Any close look at a speech community demonstrates that pronunciations, vocabularies, and grammars
are heterogeneous across social divides, genders, and geographical areas. Two speakers of two dialects would both be considered native speakers, even though they might not be able to describe how their version differs from the standard—and though they might judge the other speaker’s variety as somehow wrong or incorrect. In sign languages, the problem is profound. If you define a native speaker
as someone who uses a language from birth at home, then there are hardly any native signers, since the majority of deaf children are born to hearing, nonsigning parents. (I’m speculating, but perhaps this is why sign language courses are so popular in the United States, where college enrollments went up more than 16 percent from 2006 to 2009: though there’s a robust deaf culture, there’s no native
signing community to which one, by definition, can’t ever belong.) Russell, the biographer of Mezzofanti, never says what sort of native speaker he’s gathering evidence from.
Even if you could presume that each native speaker knows the same things that other natives know, it is a shallow standard, because one can pronounce words like a native speaker and also lack linguistic creativity. Confused
with a real speaker, the mere mimic gets labeled as a “master” simply because she’s able to string together words uninterruptedly as if she knows what she’s doing. What’s often called “fluency” might be no more than confidence (or blitheness). It’s possible that Mezzofanti only ever aspired to “passing” in most of his languages. One piece of evidence for this is his clear phonetic enthusiasm,
which Russell stingingly noted when describing Mezzofanti’s English (the italics are his): “If I were disposed to criticize it very strictly,” the Irishman wrote, “I might say (paradoxical as this may seem,) that,
compared with the enunciation of a native,
it was almost
too correct to appear completely natural
.”
Less obviously, Mezzofanti’s social rank would have restricted an accurate read of
his abilities. His meetings were probably fairly formal, which would have reduced unexpected or intimate topics. He could have controlled the meetings, too, so that none of them would endanger his linguistic reputation. Who would dare report that a person of such status couldn’t actually do what he claimed?
And the Mezzofanti of legend grew in other directions. Travelers to Italy who embarked
on the so-called Grand Tour sought out Catholic excesses that fascinated and disgusted them. Their accounts would have drawn Mezzofanti as a Romantic figure, a symbol of Catholicism’s vivacious ruin. In response, the Church would have asserted the opposite. Mezzofanti represented the Church’s ideal view of itself—conservative, theologically pure, and world-encircling—an image embedded in hagiographies
like Russell’s.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that judgments of “mastery” vary from era to era and to assume that the “fluency” and “mastery” of the eighteenth century would mean the same now that they meant then. Only a small bit of digging turns this on its head. In 1875, for instance, knowing French to the satisfaction of Harvard College meant you could translate at sight “easy” French
prose. You didn’t have to orate or converse in it or demonstrate your understanding with a French speaker.
Another example comes from the life of the adventuring hyperpolyglot
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). To show his British military superiors that he knew Hindustani, he had to translate two Hindustani books into English, translate a handwritten text, write a short essay, and have
a conversation.
*
(He passed.) Nevertheless, over his lifetime, many of his linguistic achievements were in the spoken mode—in 1853 he became one of only a dozen Christians to have sneaked into the holy city of Mecca by passing as an Indian Muslim—one possessing fluent, though accented, Arabic. Yet to his military superiors, “knowing” a language was likely to mean knowing its grammatical particulars
and its life in texts.
If time gets in the way of really knowing what someone like Mezzofanti or Burton was capable of, it also helps to explain why the hyperpolyglots of yesteryear seem to be bursting with languages while a modern educated person with a grasp of more than four is a rarity. One can talk about active language skills (talking, writing) and receptive skills (reading, listening);
the receptive ones—which even monolinguals may have surprisingly a lot of in other languages—are generally easier to acquire and use. In the era of Mezzofanti and Burton, scholars spent far more time reading and translating texts—in receptive activities, in other words—than they spent communicating with people. I’m not saying that no one talked to other people in foreign languages; I’m
saying
that for the people who were going to go around saying they knew language X or Y, one could assume that their legitimate language activities were reading and translating, which are less taxing and stressful to the brain. You can get a lot of support for reading and translating through dictionaries and grammars. To converse without embarrassing yourself, you have to monitor what you hear and what you
say in real time, and not only that, but voices in real life come with accents (which add social information) and environmental noises (which require focus); it’s also a very pragmatics-heavy activity. Thus, in Mezzofanti’s time, it would have been relatively easier to rack up languages, and to do so legitimately, than it would be today, when we seem to treat oral communication as the hallmark
of “knowing” a language.
Given the variety of historical lenses through which one can view the criteria for speaking or knowing a language, it’s simply impossible to assess definitively the claims about Mezzofanti’s ability in all of his, based on the evidence that Russell provides, anyway.
An unavoidable conclusion is that a count of one’s languages is, at best, an imperfect convenience for
talking about someone’s capabilities in them. A language isn’t a unit of measure like a kilo or an inch. What is the thing that one has when one has more than one language? Six languages with closely shared vocabulary and grammar don’t burden one’s memory or mental processing as much as six unrelated languages would. Likewise, six languages in which one can speak, read, and write don’t represent
the same sort of cognitive investment for an adult learner as six languages in which one has varying degrees of proficiency across a variety of tasks.
So what’s another way for us to grasp the scope of someone’s “cognitive investment”? Here are some possibilities.
A folk notion is that when you dream in a language, you’ve crossed some threshold on a path to fluency. In the 1980s, Canadian psychologist
Joseph De Koninck found that students of French who made the fastest progress were those who reported speaking French in their dreams sooner than fellow students. Among another group of students studying French, those who had more REM (rapid eye movement) sleep over the course of a six-week immersion program improved the most. For
people who have more experience in their languages, perhaps this
isn’t a workable measurement alternative, since bilinguals report that they speak, think, and hear in both of their languages. Often, what determines their dream language is the one they used right before they slept, not the one they know the best.