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  PRAISE FOR BABEL NO MORE

  “You’ll be awed by the incredible characters in this eye-opening book. How do they do it? And what can the rest of us learn from them?”

  —Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein

  “Babel No More is a thorough delight. An informed and even addictive guide to why some people pick up new languages so easily and how maybe you can too.”

  —John McWhorter, lecturer, Columbia University, New Republic contributing editor, and author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

  “Erard gets beneath the surface of the hyperpolyglot, piercing the myth of perfect competence, to show the actual landscape of motives, obstacles, and satisfactions that texture the world of long-distance language-learners. [They] are revealed as a tantalizing tribe, individually reticent and even charming, as they offer their incomprehensible fluency to the world at large.”

  —Nicholas Ostler, author of The Last Lingua Franca

  “A fascinating look at the unusual ability to learn multiple languages. This opens up a new area of research in the study of giftedness.”

  —Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities

  “Part biography, part detective story, Erard’s spellbinding book offers us a window through which we may view the lives of these remarkable (and remarkably diverse) characters, telling their stories while trying to answer the fundamental question: how did they do it?”

  —Claude Cartaginese, editor, The Polyglot Project

  “An intrepid and savvy linguistic explorer, Michael Erard sets out to find the world’s masters of multiple languages. He discovers the best of them, and much more about their talents and brains, their motivation and habits, and their places in society. Babel No More brings the genius language learners to life. It will delight the enthusiasts who love the challenge of learning foreign languages and will comfort the weary who dreaded facing Latin verb conjugations.”

  —Deborah Fallows, author of Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language

  We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages, twenty . . . seventy? Such feats of linguistic prowess provide a glimpse into what the human brain is capable of—and hold up a mirror to our desire to live without language barriers on a shrinking planet.

  In Babel No More, Michael Erard, “a monolingual with benefits,” sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like the nineteenth-century Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages and was such a legend that when he died people all over Europe vied for his skull. Emil Krebs, a pugnacious fin de siècle German diplomat, spoke sixty-eight languages, and Erard sees the evidence of this in Krebs’s dissected brain. Lomb Kató, a Hungarian hyperpolyglot who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels, believed that “one learns grammar from language, not language from grammar.” These massive multilinguals have long offered a natural experiment into the limits of the brain; here, at last, we can inspect the results.

  On his way to tracking down the one man who could be called the most linguistically talented person in the world, Erard meets other living language-superlearners. Among them is Alexander, a modern-day polyglot with dozens of languages who shows him the tricks of the trade and gives him a dark glimpse into the life of obsessive language acquisition. “I came to consider him as a holy man,” writes Erard. “Others do yoga; Alexander does grammatical exercises.”

  With his ambitious examination of what language is, where it lives in the brain, and the cultural implications of polyglots’ pursuits, Erard explores the upper limits of our ability to learn and to use languages, and illuminates the intellectual potential in everyone. How do some people escape the curse of Babel—and what might the gods have demanded of them in return?

  MICHAEL ERARD has graduate degrees in linguistics and rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written about language, linguists, and linguistics for Science, Slate, Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times, New Scientist, and many other publications, and is a contributing writer for Design Observer. He is the author of one other book, Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Michael was awarded the Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship in 2008 to work on Babel No More.

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  ALSO BY MICHAEL ERARD

  Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

  Free Press

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  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Erard

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Free Press hardcover edition January 2012

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  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

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 2

  APPROACH: Tracking Down Hyperpolyglots

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 3

  REVELATION: The Brain Whispers

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part 4

  ELABORATION: The Brains of Babel

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part 5

  ARRIVAL: The Hyperpolyglot of Flanders

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  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

  To 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, ser
ved, 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.

  Something else is happening as well: we’ve begun to want to naturally move among these bubbles unimpeded. Maybe you’re a Dagestani woman living in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, who speaks Russian to your husband while he speaks Arabic to you. Maybe you’re an American project manager leading phone meetings, in English, with engineers from China, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Maybe you’re a Japanese speaker working next to two Hondurans in a noodle shop. Maybe you’re a Beijinger finally realizing your dream to see the Grand Canyon. Ideas, information, goods, and people are flowing more easily through space, and this is creating a sensibility about language learning that’s rooted more in the trajectories of an individual’s life than in one’s citizenship or nationality. It’s embedded in economic demands, not the standards of schools and governments. That means that our brains also have to flow, to remain plastic and open to new skills and information. One of these skills is learning new ways to communicate.