Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
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The ability to speak multiple unrelated foreign languages fluently counts among a short list of showstopping talents, like the ability to play a Bach fugue or fly a helicopter (assuming one isn’t a harpsichordist or pilot by profession). It impresses in part because it suggests discipline, time, and effort — and, perhaps, other hidden skills.
But what if the languages came effortlessly? There are, in the history of polyglottism, a few examples of people who seem to have found a way to cheat the system and acquire languages so easily and quickly that what would normally appear a feat of discipline and erudition looks instead like savantism. These hyperpolyglots chitchat fluently in dozens of dialects, and they pick up new ones literally between meals. For the rest of us who have to slave over our verb tables, their talent resembles sorcery.
Michael Erard’s Babel No More is about these hyperpolyglots. It is not about concierges or mâitre d’s who can charm guests in Japanese, English, and French, or about diplomats who get along without a translator in Moscow, Cairo, and Shanghai. Such people are strictly amateur compared to, say, Harold Williams, a New Zealander who attended the League of Nations and is said to have spoken comfortably to each delegate in the delegate’s native tongue, or the American Kenneth Hale, who learned passable Finnish (one of about fifty languages he was reputed to speak convincingly) on a flight to Helsinki and allegedly learned Japanese after a single viewing of theShogun miniseries.
The most famous hyperpolyglot is Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the nineteenth-century Bolognese cardinal who was reputed to speak between thirty and seventy languages, ranging from Chaldaean to Algonquin. He spoke them so well, and with such a feather-light foreign accent, according to his Irish biographer, that English visitors mistook him for their countryman Cardinal Charles Acton. (They also said he spoke as if reading from The Spectator.) His ability to learn a language in a matter of days or hours was so devilishly impressive that one suspects Mezzofanti pursued the cardinalate in part to shelter himself from accusations that he had bought the talent from Satan himself.
Babel No More takes Erard (who has only modest linguistic ability of his own) to Mezzofanti’s library in Bologna, and then on the trail of modern Mezzofantis. Not one can match the ability of the cardinal himself. Many alleged hyperpolyglots turn out to be braggarts — one of them, Ziad Fazah, is now best known for appearing on a Chilean TV show and failing to respond coherently to speakers of half a dozen languages he claimed to know — and the rest are impressive but tend to need practice to keep up their skills. Their languages recede with disuse, and no one succeeds in switching from Abkhaz to Quechua to Javanese in the way Mezzofanti was said to.
Among the more impressive workhorses is Alexander Arguelles, who, at the time of his first meeting with Erard, is an unemployed academic and jogging enthusiast living in California. Arguelles reads novels in Dutch, writes and reads classical Arabic, and translates Korean for cash on the side. But he also spends twelve hours every day learning languages and obsessively cataloguing his progress. In his case, the hyperpolyglottism appears to be simply compulsive behavior.