Babel No More (19 page)

He agreed, Max’s illness
had
triggered something in fourteen-year-old Alexander. The boys hadn’t gotten along, and the elder boy felt guilty, his father said, horrified that maybe he’d caused it. To seek better care for Max, the family moved to California from New York, which compounded Alexander’s trauma. Ivan said he watched
as Alexander
sank into himself and “virtually disappeared as a person.” Ivan eventually became a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, cataloging materials in foreign languages, including Modern Greek and some South Asian materials, and became a well-published poet.

“We also apparently paid more attention to Max,” Ivan said; “naturally we’re paying more attention, but we were
aware of Alexander, and we tried to be as good to him as we could, but I don’t think Alexander perceived it that way. I think he felt rejected.” The adolescent Alexander had few friends, and no girlfriend, which worried his father. When Alexander came home one day with records by Twisted Sister and Elvis Costello, Ivan was relieved. The boy would be okay.

In Ivan’s telling, he hadn’t raised Alexander
to be a hyperpolyglot, in the way a football fan might bring his offspring into the yard to toss the ball and run patterns, yearning to make a star. Ivan didn’t even know Alexander was learning languages until his son confessed it years later. He was flabbergasted when Alexander confessed, as an adult, to learning languages. I asked Ivan if it bothered him that Alexander knew more languages
than he did.

“Oh, I have no problem at all,” he said. “I used to joke, you can keep your Germanic languages, but I want the Romance languages.”

Ivan was about forty years old when he decided to focus on Hindi, which meant giving up Chinese. He had realized that acquiring the skills he wanted in Hindi, such as reading the literature, would require a lot of time. “I knew that in my finite existence,
I’m never going to get to the Chinese. I’m just concentrating on what I can do.”

He became pensive. “I’m going to be seventy in January. I’ve realized, as each year passes, how much more finite my term of life on the planet is, so that if it took me this long to get where I am, how little time I have before I’m senile. So this is an awareness I’ve gotten in the last two years, the real awareness
of one’s limitations.” Like his son, he is a juggler of the minutes of the day’s minutes. Yet he enjoys himself more. No longer a feverish acolyte, he has passed to some other state of enlightenment in which languages don’t need winning or wooing, because they’re truly his friends. He told me that he’ll be able to finish Persian but not Arabic, though next he’d like to embark on Tamil, the grammatical
delights of which he extolled as time stole the warmth from our coffee.

I was surprised to learn that no one knows how many languages Alexander can speak or use to read and write, not even his father. Unlike other self-proclaimed hyperpolyglots and even some of the people who follow his instructional YouTube videos, Alexander, at the time I met him, refused to put a number on them. “If someone
tells you how many languages they speak, then you shouldn’t trust them,” he insisted.

Come on, I said, tell me how many you know—I’ll still trust you.

He begged off. Others have pressed him. “The fingers start going up, they start counting on their fingers,” he said. “They don’t get very far, because there aren’t very many people who can name many languages.”

Later I read an interview in which
he says he’s studied close to sixty languages and might be able to develop “real reading knowledge” in twenty.

Though he’s admitted a number (for practical reasons, he’d say), he hasn’t changed his position that a raw count of languages is unreliable; it’s a shortcut, a way for talking to people who don’t comprehend, which creates more confusion. He likened his own knowledge to a spiderweb, where
newly learned items tie to other things. “How do you remember all the vocabulary?” I asked him once.

“Why should I forget it?” he retorted.

“It’s just a lot of stuff,” I said.

“If you study something deliberately and respectfully, it becomes part of you and it has a relationship to other things, so why should it slip away?” And he’s right—we remember things better when they are tied to other
things, especially strong personal emotions, but also to basic drives (like sex). Yet Alexander said he uses no mnemonics to remember words or grammatical patterns except for the etymological connections that he already possesses.

Sitting in his library one afternoon, I saw a poignant exchange between Alexander and his eldest son, who had wandered in to watch us. Alexander had tried to coax him
to stay before, sometimes by saying things about languages that struck me as uncomfortably earnest.

Alexander: You’re going to a Spanish school next year.

Son: No, and no, and no!

Alexander: How come you don’t want to speak Spanish?

Son: Because they’re hard . . . it’s hard.

Alexander: What about French and English?

Son: Not . . . as hard as that, but French is a little bit more harder than
English.

Alexander: Why?

Son: Because when you’re starting to learn French you make mistakes, but English you don’t, but only a few. But you make a lot with French and other languages.

Alexander: So English is the natural language?

Son: Yeah.

The boy giggled, squirmed away, and ran out of the room; I laughed with his father. But the exchange had a sadness, pointing to a gulf between father
and son that seemed destined to widen. Or maybe it was that he was pushing them to become devout followers of his religion when they still too young. We attribute great linguistic abilities to children, but the pursuit of the mystery of languages, like the pursuit of God, is for adults alone.

Alexander doesn’t get strident about it, but he doesn’t want me to talk about the brain, his or anybody
else’s. You won’t find any answers there, he says. The few times I posed questions about talent, aptitude, or anything cognitive that he might have been born with, Alexander let me know that he doesn’t possess those things. I get the sense that he wants his discipline, his scholarly mien, and his incisive (if fusty) appreciations—his personality, in other words—to get the credit for his accomplishments.
As far as the will to plasticity goes, focus on the will, he was saying, not on the plasticity.

Yet plasticity is what it looks like. Here he was in his early forties, still learning new things. He had adjusted his tasks to stretch his cognitive skills without overtaxing them. By reading and writing and depending on dictionaries when he needs to, he can make his use of languages the easier receptive,
not productive, feat. Also, he can worry less about how his knowledge of English will interfere with the word order and other
syntactic variations in other languages, because he’s not generating new sentences in real time. His shadowing exercises make him familiar with pronunciations, but they can’t prepare him for the etiquette of a culture. He’s not bothered by this gap in knowledge, though.
He can do what’s expected in English, Korean, German, and French. If he spent enough time in a country, he said, he could compile what he knows and talk to people. He also reduces the challenges he faces by not striving for a native accent. Once, he snapped at “a coterie of critics who always surface to harp on the lack of a native accent (as if such a thing were desirable, let alone attainable).”

Alexander’s languages have made him more efficient at learning more languages. It’s commonly accepted that learning a second language within the same family is simpler, and this is true (it saves time with vocabulary, for instance). But Alexander and others with his capacities can take advantage of experience across families. People like him have honed the learning strategies that work for them
and use them more often. Presented with a new language, he has an easier time grasping its sounds and its patterns, but he needed five or six languages before his hard work began paying off.

One person I met later claimed to have “cracked the code” of Arabic verbs, which are usually taught in the past tense first, because those are the shortest. Then people learn the present tenses, and with
a lot of difficulty learn the exceptions. This person figured out that it’s easier to learn the present tense first, and then to derive the past. “I found very beautiful rules, almost without exceptions,” he exclaimed, “so that means the system had been upside down for centuries!” Another person had a system for learning the tones of Mandarin, Hmong, and Thai that involved practicing all of the possible
two-tone combinations. He did this mainly to help in accurately perceiving and producing the tones; along with knowing each tone in isolation, you eventually have to know the transitions to and from every adjacent tone.

Just as they can become peculiarly invested in certain language structures, hyperpolyglots report emotional reactions to languages that drive or repel them. Alexander said he
doesn’t like the way Mandarin sounds, so it was easy for him to stop working on it. From a woman who’d majored in four languages in college and went on to serve as a military
interpreter in Russian, I heard that she had been unable to learn Arabic during her deployment in Iraq because it was the enemy’s language. A man reported that in middle school he’d chosen German over French, which he perceived
as a “sissy” language, a perception that stayed with him for decades.

Neither are all parts of the grammar of a language equally friendly. Christopher, the “polyglot savant,” got stumped as readily as normal speakers by the meaning of a word in a language invented by researchers (the word meant something different depending on where it was placed and whether it was attached to the third word
of a sentence or appeared in a sentence’s third clause). The hyperpolyglot who “cracked” Arabic said that Russian verbs had stumped him. As in many languages, these verbs have two forms, one for finished action (the perfective), one for unfinished action (the imperfective). In Russian the rules for perfective and imperfective are complex, with many exceptions. He felt you’d have to be brought up in
a Russian family to get the verbs right. The great Mezzofanti himself suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling with Mandarin Chinese in Naples and lost every language he knew except his mother tongue, Bolognese.

Does Alexander have superior analytical abilities? He won’t even speculate. On such questions, he seemed bizarrely preoccupied with what it would tell about language learning more
broadly. Once I tried telling him about research on a small group of accomplished adult learners of Dutch and the factors that contributed to their success. At first he listened respectfully, then he stopped me. “It’s just this teeny tiny group of people. How is this going to help the other people who are studying Dutch?” I enumerated some of what exceptional language learning could provide, but
he didn’t want to change his mind, for fear he’d have to admit some biological gift not of his making.

I regarded him for a moment, then took up a thought and speared him with it:
Speak, brain,
I wanted to lean close and whisper,
tell me the secret thing that’s in you, tell me what drives you. You’ve traced the human languages, each one a richly layered symphony, to the place where they become the simplest of hummable tunes. And you’ve looked in the eye of the Ur-language that lies buried in our heads and radiates its timeless mystery. And yet, when asked why you can do what you do, you cannot say one syllable! Speak, brain!

If Alexander didn’t entertain my interest in his cranium’s contents, he was downright discouraging when it came to my interest in Ziad Fazah. Clearly he disapproved
of the way Fazah had sullied polyglottery with spectacle. Or so he perceived it. A couple of days into my visit, he revealed that when he lived in Beirut, he found out things about Fazah that he’d never revealed to the polyglot forum. Fazah had said he’d learned his many languages from sailors, but “there just aren’t that many sailors,” Alexander said. “Are there Azerbaijani sailors walking
down the street in Beirut? You just don’t find them.”

Fazah also claimed to have gained notoriety among local diplomats. Thirty years later, no one in Beirut had ever heard of Fazah, Alexander said. You’d think that someone who had made that sort of splash would have been better known. “I had some acquaintances who were journalists, and I asked them to look in archives there over the past couple
of decades and see if there had been any reports,” he said. “They couldn’t find anything.”

“Whatever else is going on, there is one patent lie,” he added, “that he got the materials that he needed to do this from the public library in Beirut.
There was no public library in Beirut when he would have been living there.
The resources were not available. I think the whole thing is a Borgesian fiction,”
he concluded. I thought, to be honest, all of you could have been imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about people with perfectly accurate memories who are crippled by remembering, and about an infinite library of Babel that contains translations into all languages of every book that had ever been and would be written. A man who knew every language ever spoken and invented yet could say
nothing to anyone? Seems like a quintessential Borges character. So was the case of one polyglot judging another polyglot, not by going head-to-head with languages, but by circumstantial evidence.

He told me about a blogger named Ryan Boothe, who had actually gone to Brazil and met Fazah. “He believes in Fazah,” Alexander said.
That’s interesting, I thought. Was hyperpolyglottery a matter of
belief and not fact, in the same way that one can continue to believe in Bigfoot or UFOs? Later, Boothe told me that he didn’t believe that Fazah speaks fifty-nine languages fluently, but, as he said, that’s not the point: “It’s not that he speaks fifty-nine languages fluently or that he doesn’t speak any languages at all.”

He added, “To be frank, those who claim to speak dozens of languages
are being misleading unless they qualify their abilities with phrases like, ‘I’m fluent in three, conversational in twenty, and can read another thirty quite comfortably.’ Conversely, it would be nice if people were a little better informed and understood that speaking a foreign language is a skill much like playing the piano. Once you’ve acquired the skill it’s actually not too hard to reacquire
it after years of neglect.”