Babel No More (4 page)

By the end of my journey, I realized that hyperpolyglots are avatars of what I call the “will to plasticity.” This is the belief that we can, if we so wish, reshape our brains—and that the world impels us to do so.
Two quick examples of the impetus for high-intensity language learning should suffice. “I want
to be a polyglot,” someone posted on Twitter; I asked him why. “Because I want to be able to go anywhere and be able to communicate with anyone,” he replied. Then there was a news story extolling ten-year-old Arpan Sharma, a British boy who supposedly speaks eleven languages, who explained that “When I’m an adult . . . I want to be a surgeon who can work in all the hospitals of the world and speak
the language of the country I’m in.” Whether you have learned one additional language or a dozen, you have emulated this same desire. I hope I’m not glorifying them too much by saying that the hyperpolyglot makes visible the myriad strands of our linguistic destinies, whether we speak only one language or many.

Some of these strands and destinies take shape in the group of people who form what
I call a neural tribe. They’ve developed along neurological paths distinct from the rest of us, journeys that have given them a sense of mission and personal identity as language learners.

Linguistically, they’re out of time, place, and scale. Could they be an advanced specimen of the species? It’s tempting to think so. They are not born; they are not made; but they are born to be made. We’d
need more advanced neuroscience to explore the nuances of the linguistic brain. I hope to be around to see it.

It’s an odd tribe—there is no unified voice, no leaders, and no rules. In many ways, it’s a lost tribe, belonging to no nation. Yet, their dislocations seem reminiscent of everyone else’s. They have something to tell us about what our brains can do and what we must do to make our peace
with Babel.

Chapter 2

W
hen the topic of hyperpolyglots comes up, the historical character Giuseppe Mezzofanti inevitably does, too, so it made sense for my quest to begin with him. I headed to Bologna, Italy, where I hoped to uncover, with 150 years of linguistic and neurological research to my advantage, evidence that his admirers and biographers had overlooked. It wasn’t just the number of languages ascribed
to Mezzofanti that impressed me; it was the speed at which he was said to learn them, and his ability to switch between them. How could he do that?
Could
he really do that? Did he know languages rather than facts about languages, and could he use them in a specialized, substantial way? The answers would anchor a deeper investigation into the nature of linguistic talents.

There was also the open
question about his methods. When, in 1840, the Russian scholar A. V. Starchevsky met Mezzofanti in Rome, he successfully puzzled the language genius by speaking to him in Ukrainian.

Mezzofanti seemed surprised. “What language is that?” he asked, in Italian.

“Little Russian,” Starchevsky replied, using a term of his day.

“Well, come to see me again in two weeks,” Mezzofanti said.

Starchevsky
returned to find the cardinal able to speak to him, very
fluently, in Ukrainian. They chatted for hours. Understandably, the Russian was amazed. How had Mezzofanti done it?

The simple answer was that Russian and Ukrainian are related languages, both belonging to the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic language family. “I had known Russian already,” Mezzofanti explained.

This didn’t satisfy Starchevsky.
“One knowing Latin can easily learn Italian,” he said, “but not within a fortnight.” After the visit, he became obsessed with the notion that Mezzofanti possessed some esoteric key, perhaps a verbal elixir. For forty years, he read everything about the polyglot cardinal that he could find, but an answer eluded him.

“I was about giving up my task,” he recalled, “when suddenly I struck the hidden
secret of Mezzofanti.” He passed this secret along only to his students, which allowed them to master a new language in three to four weeks, he said. A new “polyglot college” would be founded in St. Petersburg, headed by Starchevsky, who would use the technique to teach the seventy languages of the Russian czar’s domain.

“Every man of average capability can learn any foreign language within a
month,” Starchevsky proclaimed, “and whoever fails is a lazy or a stupid fellow.” Plans for the college were lost in the tumult of the Russian Revolution. But what had the Russian found?

With minutes to spare in Geneva, Switzerland, I found my overnight train to Italy. On the platform, I checked my ticket with the conductor, hauled my suitcase down the sleeper car’s narrow hallway into its tiny,
tidy compartment, and unpacked a sandwich and a bottle of beer. I took out
Moby-Dick
and kicked off my shoes. After a hectic day of travel, I was looking forward to a quiet evening. I also needed to be rested so I could hit Bologna’s libraries and archives first thing in the morning.

A couple of minutes later, the conductor came by, a grandfatherly Italian with a thick black moustache and forbearing
eyes, gesturing for my ticket. Aha. He shook his finger, said something in Italian, and pointed to the ticket’s date, by which I grasped: the ticket is for today’s date, but for a month later. Fortunately, the conductor can tell me where I can go, I thought. No, wait, I realized, he can’t speak English. And I
don’t speak Italian. I can speak Spanish, I said. (At least enough to understand what
needs to happen here, I thought to myself.) Oh, so can I, he said, and, switching to Spanish, he explained what he was going to do. The suitcase was unstowed; the sandwich, beer, and book packed up; and I was squeezed past two backpackers who were waiting for what turned out to be their compartment.

The train had started out, and now I needed a berth. Until he could secure me a permanent spot
for the night, the conductor put me in a compartment with a man who spoke only Italian. In preparation for my trip, I’d been reading a new book about Mezzofanti that had been written in Italian—or, rather, I’d been placing Italian words into grammatical patterns from Spanish. Whenever I’d gotten stuck or wanted to check an intuition (or, let’s face it, a flat-out guess), I’d made liberal use of Google’s
language tools. Now I found myself with someone to speak to, but my lips were welded shut. Ashamed that something more Spanishified than Italian would come out of my mouth (especially since it had been primed talking with the conductor), I let the welds hold, and the opportunity flashed by like the Swiss countryside.

I spent the night in a compartment with a youth from South Korea who spoke a
bit of English and a Peruvian guy living in Geneva who spoke English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese. Not all equally well, he admitted, and he’d once known Italian, but as soon as he’d studied Portuguese as an adult, he lost his Italian
completely
. His English was far from impeccable—his accent thick and his sentences simple—but would I say he spoke English? We talked about educational
philosophies for a while, all in English, and I didn’t choose easier words on his behalf. Sure, I’d say he spoke English.

And let me tell you, there’s nothing like a trip on a European train to make a white American fellow realize that English, his cradle and his throne, has also been his prison. Sitting with a guy who speaks five languages (four of which he wasn’t native to) was intimidating.
I started to feel defensive: to be fair, if Americans lived near or traveled across as many borders as Europeans do, they might be multilingual, too. It’s all about context and need, and those together engender a cultural confidence about learning languages that’s hard to replicate. Once monolingualism is in the genome of a culture, it’s hard to breed out.

I told him I was going to Bologna to
research a nineteenth-century cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke a huge number of languages, seventy-two of them, or so it was said. I felt compelled to include that last caveat—I didn’t want him to think I accepted the claim uncritically. Had Mezzofanti actually been able to speak that many? I didn’t know for sure, though all the accounts of his life had confirmed a very high number.

“Seventy-two languages,” my new friend said. “That’s incredible.”

I know, I thought, it’s
incredible,
isn’t it? If there were no traces, or if the stories could be proved false, I would at least be able to feel the grim satisfaction of the devil’s advocate: to have dispelled a fraudulent reputation, to have discredited a miracle.

But if clues to his genius could be found, then this trip would
count as a pilgrimage. As a kid, I had fantasized about learning many languages, too. To be able to talk and read in something other than English seemed proof that a gawky pubescent dreamer could shed his gawkiness and achieve his dreams of escaping to far-off places. But the dream sagged to the ground like a kite on a windless day. At the start of every summer vacation, my mother made me list what
I wanted to accomplish by August. The top of the list: “Learn French.” (My family’s ethnically French.) And there it stayed, year after year; I never learned French.
I never even began
. Without anyone to help me, I didn’t know where to start. High school Spanish beckoned, but the dullness of the classes bleached my passion and the language along with it.

In college, an academic advisor noted
Spanish on my transcript. “What about studying abroad in South America?” she asked. My reluctance was brief. Soon enough, I found myself sitting in a kitchen in Bogotá, Colombia, attempting small talk with Zoraida, my host mother. A desperate search for chitchat, not my strong suit even in English, had me squeaking
“Me gusta tu perro”
about the small white dog licking my hand.

“You already said
that,” Zoraida remarked in Spanish.

Understanding that much was luck. Eventually I grew to say, read, and comprehend much more, surprising myself. Traveling made it easier to hang on to the language. I understood entire lectures delivered in the pure accent of the Colombian
altiplano
without registering that I
was doing so. A girlfriend, an American, who had acquired French and Spanish during
what appeared (to my dreamer’s eye) to be an exotic childhood, spurred me to get language experiences of my own. Which is why, after college, I lived in Taiwan teaching English, studying Mandarin Chinese, picking up a bit of Taiwanese (a bar trick that proved as useful in the classroom), and testing the folk wisdom that lovers make the best language teachers. Days went by when I spoke no English
outside of the classroom. I wondered: If this keeps up, will I recognize myself?

At my best moments in these languages, I felt comfortable speaking and listening, and I always improved, though not unceasingly—the plateaus could be as long and unbroken as Kansas. Back in the States, with English full-time, my fluencies collapsed, perhaps because I hadn’t reached a high enough level, or because
I didn’t do the right things to keep up my skills. Floating in the back of my mind was the thought that if I couldn’t gain a native’s fluency, pursuing these languages was inconsequential.

The truth is, I’m neither a language superhero nor a hyperpolyglot. I consider myself a
monolingual with benefits
: more than a monoglot, much less than a polyglot. Fantasies of restoring some bit of that fluency
in Spanish and Chinese rise up now and then, but I might as well hope to grow feathers and fly. I loved using those languages, but finding opportunities to do so where I live takes effort. I can be lazy and haphazard. My forty-three-year-old memory is more sieve than steel trap. And I bear the emotional legacy of teachers and textbook writers who made me submit to pedagogical contraptions that
made language learning cumbersome and absurd. One goal of adulthood is to avoid all the irrelevant and absurd things imposed on us in childhood, so the path clearly leads away from the language classroom. Life is Sisyphean enough as it is.

Yet, in speaking another language, I’ve also experienced some of the thrillingest thrills in my life, when the sunlight of sense shone on gobbledygook; when
the smooth and effortless Spanish or Chinese conversations of my dream life happen when I’m awake. When I piece together a sentence in Hindi to the delight of my hosts. When I overhear Beijing merchants discuss the price of some merchandise in Mandarin, and then tell them, in Mandarin, that I know the true price after they’ve quoted me a higher one. When I glimpse, even for a split second, a different
way
to be, and begin to accrue more self—an uncanny me emerging from a strange syntax. These are feelings I love, and would love to have again. That much I share with the hyperpolyglots I describe in this book.

But I don’t know why the hard part of learning languages was so hard, or why the easy parts were easy. All I know is that I don’t want to speak seventy-two or even twelve languages. I
really just want more of the easy and less of the hard.

The next day, I arrived in Bologna. I wanted to find the truth, but if it eluded me, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Before embarking for Bologna, I had contacted a few experts for some perspective on what I hoped to find. One was a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, Claire Kramsch, who had published and written a lot about
multilingualism, so I looked forward to her sympathetic insights. Yes, she told me, there are people who learn many languages. Then she paused. “Not only Europeans, I mean, but in Africa children grow up knowing, speaking, parts or elements of eight or nine different languages at the drop of a hat because they live in regions where villages have their own languages, and people intermarry and learn
each other’s ways of speaking, and so forth.

“But I wouldn’t say that they
speak
different languages,” she added, in a charming British accent of her own. “They speak many different languages, but they don’t necessarily know how to read or write in them, which often don’t have a written form. And those languages are used in very specific contexts—you need to know the language of the tribe that
you’re going to meet at the water pump, but you won’t necessarily know how to order meat from them at the market. So each language is restricted to a particular domain.