Babel No More (42 page)

79
Sidis was also doing at the age of four: “Give Easy Recipe for Child Prodigies,”
New York Times,
Oct. 31, 1920.

79
probably didn’t speak those seventeen languages, either: “Winifred Stoner Plea
Calls Count a Faker,”
New York Times,
March 19, 1930.

79
world tour to “find geniuses”: “Stoners to Start Hunt for Geniuses,”
New York Times,
Aug. 3, 1927.

80
had her marriage annulled: “Winifred Stoner Plea Calls Count a Faker,”
New York Times,
March 19, 1930.

80
couldn’t say “no” in any of them: The joke was first written in 1931 by a
Chicago Tribune
columnist, Richard Henry Little, though
it has also been attributed to Dorothy Parker. Little’s version goes, “Winifred Stackville Stoner II, now twenty-nine and who is reported in the public press as having just left her third, was renowned at the age of six, when she wrote a book, as a child genius. And a few years later, with her hair still in pigtails, it was proudly proclaimed that Winifred could speak twelve languages. But apparently
Winifred never learned to say ‘no’ in any of them and hiked up to the altar as fast as anybody suggested the idea.”

80
by lunchtime, Hale . . . would be conversing fluently: See the MIT tribute web page for Ken Hale, which contains many of these and other stories, here:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/events/tributes/hale/testimonies.html
.

80
admiring lore was matched by his colleagues’ regard:
Victor Golla, “Hale, Wurm, and Mezzofanti,”
SSILA Newsletter,
20:4 (Jan. 2002), 2–4.

82
denials were rejected: Lisa Cheng and Rint Sybesma, “The Excitement Comes from the Language Itself!,”
Glot,
2: 9/10 (Dec. 1996).

84
he quips in one video:
www.ganahl.info/videos/Wojia.mp4
.

84
something of a manifesto: Rainer Ganahl, “Travelling Linguistics,”
www.ganahl.info/t_travelling_linguistics.html
.

85
191 million in 2005: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division,
Trends in Total Migrant Stock: The 2005 Revision
(New York: United Nations, 2006).

85
World Bank statistics from 2005: Dilip Ratha and William Shaw,
South-South Migration and Remittances,
World Bank Working Paper no. 102 (2005), 2.

85
The bulk moved within Europe/Central Asia: Ibid., 7.

85
anticipates 1.6 billion
a year by 2020: World Tourism Organization,
Tourism 2020 Vision
.

85
“The will to plasticity” . . . among them, language circuits: To borrow a phrase from Pierre Kosslowski (Daniel W. Smith, trans.),
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 46.

86
“Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain,” Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Amir Amedi, Felipe Fregni, and
Lotfi Merabet, “The Plastic Human Brain Cortex,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience,
28 (2005), 377. See also Peter Huttenlocher,
Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

86
self-help guru Tim Ferriss published “language hacking” guides on his website:
www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/
.

86
A New York–based writer, Ellen Jovin, has a blog:
www.ellenjovin.com
.

Chapter 7

94
“He spends most of his waking hours digging in the garden”: Neil Smith and Ianthi Tsimpli,
The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 2.

94
Christopher can translate from and communicate in: Ibid., 12.

96
Given a newspaper in one of his languages: Ibid., 82.

96
didn’t get better at distinguishing syntactically: Ibid., 92.

96
Normal second-language learners have a harder time: Gary Morgan et al., “Language Against the Odds: The Learning of British Sign Language by a Polyglot Savant,”
Journal of Linguistics,
38 (2002), 4.

96
“basically English with a range of alternative veneers”: Smith and Tsimpli,
Mind of a Savant,
122.

97
experiment they document
:
Neil Smith, Ianthi Tsimpli, Gary Morgan, and Bencie Woll,
The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds
(Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

98
“a working knowledge of French, Spanish”: Bernard Rimland, “Savant Capabilities of Autistic Children and Their Cognitive Implications,” in G. Serban (ed.),
Cognitive Defects in the Development of Mental Illness
(New York: Brunner/Mazel,
1878), 43–65. Quoted in David Birdsong’s
Contemporary Psychology
review of Smith and Tsimpli,
Mind of a Savant,
cited above.

98
or that his fascination with languages was so remarkable: Elizabeth Bates. “On Language Savants and the Structure of the Mind.”
International Journal of Bilingualism,
1:2 (1997), 163–79.

98
rote memory, considered one hallmark: S. Bölte and F. Poustka: “Comparing the
Intelligence Profiles of Savant and Nonsavant Individuals with Autistic Disorder,”
Intelligence,
32 (2004), 121–31.

98
“Christopher is not so much a successful learner of languages”: David Birdsong, “An Interesting Subject Indeed,”
Contemporary Psychology,
41:8 (1996), 837–38.

98
“no relevant evidence” for language talents: Ibid., 182.

98
“supremely gifted at learning new languages”: Smith,
Tsimpli, Morgan, and Woll,
Signs of a Savant.
, 40.

99
a very nearly complete handbook: Amorey Gethin and Erik V. Gunnemark,
The Art and Science of Learning Languages
(Oxford, UK: Intellect Books: 1996).

100
“three pillars” of language learning: Ibid., 26.

101
She’d also written a memoir: Scott Alkire, “Kató Lomb’s Strategies for Language Learning and SLA,”
The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching,
1:4 (Fall 2005), 17–26.

101
learning her seventeenth language, Hebrew: Stephen Krashen and Natasha Kiss, “Notes on a Polyglot: Kató Lomb,”
System,
24:2 (1996), 207–10.

102
they “acquire” it: Stephen Krashen, “Case Histories and the Comprehension Hypothesis,” Plenary Address, English Teaching Association Conference, 2007,
www.eslminiconf.net/september/krashen.html
.

102
“(I
was fifty-four at the time)”: Ibid.

103
“remove the mystical fog”: Kató Lomb,
Polyglot: How I Learn Languages
(ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne, trans.; Scott Alkire, ed.) (Berkeley, CA: TESL-EJ, 2008).

103
“Be firmly convinced that you are a linguistic genius”: Lomb, Ibid., 161.

103
“The language learning method that is good”: Ibid., 76.

103
“all I suggest is that monologues be silent”: Ibid.,
77.

103
the difference between finding entertainment: Peter Skehan,
A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17.

103
“I will sooner see a UFO than a dative case”: Lomb,
Polyglot,
122.

104
“live inside me simultaneously with Hungarian”: Ibid., viii.

104
ability to “switch between any of these languages”: Ibid.

104
English at the age of twenty-four:
Ibid.

104
Russian at thirty-two: Ibid.

104
brush up for half a day: Ibid., xvii.

104
“the same level of ability”: Ibid.

Chapter 8

106
1996 news report: All the biographical information here comes from Tova Chapoval, “One-Man Tower of Babel; Fluent in 58 Languages, Brazilian Tries to Sell Method,”
Washington Post,
Dec. 27, 1996, B8.

108
In 2006, when Israel bombed and invaded: Alexander Arguelles’s
account was published in the
San Jose Mercury News
on Aug. 13, 2006, “Deliverance: Thousands Fled Israeli Bombs Pummeling Lebanon. This Is the Story of One American Family’s Escape.”

109
everyone could see Fazah’s spectacular failure
.
As of April 2011, the video was posted at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XA1Ifi-ntE
.

110
“one of billions of people who are unable to speak fifty-nine languages”:
http://ardentagnostic.blogspot.com/2009/03/ziad-fazah-man-who-does-not-speak-59.html
.

Chapter 9

123
that work for them and use them more often”: See Charlotte Kemp. “Strategic Processing in Grammar Learning: Do Multilinguals Use More Strategies?”
International Journal of Multilingualism,
4:4 (2007), 241–61.

134
He recommended reviewing any learned material . . . at intervals: Paul Pimsleur, “A Memory Schedule,”
Modern Language Journal
51 (1967), 73–75.

134
what one remembers
doesn’t decline steadily over a lifetime: Harry Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore: Fifty Years of Memory for Spanish Learned in School,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
113:1 (1984), 1–31.

135
“including learning, reasoning, and preparation for action”: Alan Baddeley and
Graham Hitch, “Working Memory,” in G. A. Bower (ed.),
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation,
vol. 8 (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 47–90.

135
the best predictor of intelligence: See, for example, R. Kyllonen and R. Chrisal, “Reasoning Ability Is (Little More than) Working Memory Capacity,”
Intelligence,
14:4 (1990), 389–433.

135
four to five words every second: From Willem Levelt,
Speaking: From Intention to Articulation
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

137
“Have you ever tried
on a pair of green spectacles?”: Charles Russell
, The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, with an Introductory Memoir of Eminent Linguists, Ancient and Modern
(London: Longman, Brown, and Co., 1858)
,
421.

138
also known as the Feast of the Languages:
www.newadvent.org/cathen/12456a.htm
.

138
he was dazzled: Russell,
Life,
411–20.

138
A speaker has to do two things: J. Abutalebi and David Green, “Bilingual
Language Production: The Neurocognition of Language Representation and Control,”
Journal of Neurolinguistics,
20 (2007), 251; J. Crinion et al., “Language Control in the Bilingual Brain,”
Science,
312 (2006), 1537–40.

139
requires some powerful neural hardware. J. Lipski, “Code-switching or Borrowing? No sé
so
no puedo decir,
you know
,” in Lofti Sayahi and Maurice Westmoreland (eds.),
Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics
(Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2005), 1–15.