Babel No More (56 page)

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Hindustani was the eighth language Burton learned in his life, after Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Provençal, Spanish, and Béarnais. He would go on to learn Gujarati, Persian, Sanskrit, Marathi, Arabic, Sindhi, and Punjabi—all by the age of twenty-four. By 1848 he passed official exams in six languages and had prepared for two others. He also learned Telugu, Toda,
Somali, and Swahili—all told, twenty-nine languages and eleven dialects. “In those days,” Burton wrote, referring to the days of the East India Company, “sensible men who went out to India took one of two lines—they either shot, or they studied languages.” Learning languages was made easier via the habit of assigning local women to soldiers as “temporary wives.” A “walking dictionary,” such a wife
would be called. Burton also took up with local prostitutes; that was how he learned Somali. Burton would go on to surpass another soldier, Christopher Palmer Rigby, who was considered to be the most outstanding speaker of languages in the Indian Army; for this reason Rigby later became an enemy. Burton never seems to have claimed that he spoke twenty-nine languages concurrently but learned them
in blocks or spurts, and when he returned to Arabia after several years in England he had to refresh his Arabic. He probably was never using more than three to five languages at a time—not a lot for an adventurer, more than your average armchair explorer, yet a far cry from the twenty-nine attributed to him.

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The issue concerned what it meant to say someone was baptized “in” water.

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To preserve
the writer’s anonymity and that of his family, N. is not his real initial.

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English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopic, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Danish, “Irelandic” (perhaps Gaelic), Estonian, Bohemian, and Polish.

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Naturally, one asks, who certified her abilities, and by what standards? In Mother Stoner’s lectures on natural education, she
brought small children onstage and asked them to repeat “cow” and “pig” in Chinese, “good-bye” and “good morning” in Japanese, and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in Latin. After the children repeated the words, Mother Stoner announced, “There you see, they speak Japanese.” “If Miss Winifred Stoner, the accomplished daughter, speaks her twelve languages only on that basis, she has not added much
to the world’s stock of knowledge,” wrote one E. X. Porter to the
New York Times
on May 4, 1915.

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Sidis was also said to be a prodigious language learner, though the myths perpetuated about him make this difficult to determine.

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These were no. 1 Mexico–US, no. 3 Turkey–Germany, no. 4 India–United Arab Emirates (UAE), no. 5 Philippines–US, no. 7 Germany–US, no. 9 India–Saudi Arabia. Migrants
between Afghanistan and Iran, Algeria and France, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia wouldn’t need to learn new languages. In 2010, no. 5 was China–US, no. 6 was Philippines–US, and no. 10 was India–UAE.

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Neurobiologist Marcus Jacobson defined “plasticity” as the adjustments of the nervous system to changes in the internal and external “milieu.” Changes to the internal milieu come from trauma and disease.
Changes to the external milieu occur through input through the senses. These two milieus also interact with each other in ways that scientists are trying to understand. I use “plasticity” in the second sense, as well as in these interactions.

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Whether or not children are better language learners, and in what way, is a frequent topic among foreign-language learners and language acquisition scientists.
I like what Rainer Ganahl told me: “Kids do not necessarily learn better, but their feeling for time and success is different.” Which the Hippos also embrace.

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Hippo’s official seven languages are Mandarin, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish; they have since added Arabic, Cantonese, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai,
Turkish, and Vietnamese.

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Progress, however, has been slow. Only half of EU citizens polled in 2005 said they could hold a conversation in at least one language other than their mother tongue, which makes for the unexpectedly high number of 250 million European monolinguals. The highest rates of bilingualism were in Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, and Lithuania; the lowest were Hungary, the UK, Portugal,
Italy, and Spain. See the results of the 2005 Eurobarometer poll at http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_237.en.pdf.

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Christopher can translate from and communicate in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Modern Greek, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh.

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Hungarian surnames appear before given names.

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In general,
famous language learners, language accumulators, and language geeks tend to be men, though lack of real evidence has to leave this an open question—a link between gender and language-learning ability hasn’t been explored, not surprisingly; researchers haven’t looked at the links between language aptitude and socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference, either. In my online survey of
those speaking six or more languages, 69 percent were male. This doesn’t mean that men are better than women at learning languages—it may simply mean that men are more likely to fill out online surveys that are designed to appreciate their intellectual prowess. Indeed, boasting about the languages one has studied or can speak is a display of geek machismo. On the other hand, professions that require
high-level linguistic skills, such as interpreting, have more women practitioners than men; one suggestion is that interpreters must be invisible and nonegotistic, a role that women may, depending on the cultural setting, be better prepared to play.

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Like Gunnemark, she also believed that children were not necessarily better language learners than adults. She concedes that “after 10 or 11 [years
old],” one cannot pronounce like a native speaker, but she’s proud of her accent: “After learning 16 languages and after more than a half a century of living in Budapest, sharp-eared people can still discover in my speech the vowels typical of natives of [southern Hungary].” The main problem of age, she said, is memory loss, but there are tricks to prevent or forestall this.

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Ardaschir was the
name of a Persian king who conquered northern India.

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Eccentricity runs in his family. Joseph later changed his name to José and added an umlaut to Arguelles, becoming José Argüelles. “I don’t know how much you know about New Age culture,” Ivan added, “but José has become a huge figure in the New Age movement.” In the 1970s, José promoted the “harmonic convergence” and later preached humankind’s
doom because the twelve-month Gregorian calendar was out of synch with natural rhythms. “The entire planet is operating with the wrong calendar and living in the wrong, artificial timing frequency,” he wrote. For years he went by the name Valum Votan and promoted the year 2012 as the end of the world, because it coincides with the closing of a historical cycle of a calendar he adapted from the
Mayan cycle. After a brief illness, he died in March 2011.

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Modern novels in Hindi and Bengali, he said, he can read with ease; it astounds him how little learning material exists for them, given that Bengali is the sixth most popular language on the planet, with 181 million native speakers.

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Good guess, but it’s not: Hindi keeps the copula, the “to be” verb, at the end of the sentence, so
the sentence “The tea is hot” appears as “Tea hot is” in Hindi.

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Christopher’s performances on a variety of memory tasks are so unexpected, he may be a better candidate for studies of anomalous memorizers than of language.

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He listed them as “Arabic, Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Finnish, French, Georgian, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,
Javanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Malay, Manchu, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu.” By his death in 1930 he also had Egyptian, Afghan, Albanian, Altarmenisch, Basque, Burmese, Estonian, Gaelic, Gujarati, Icelandic, Irish, Catalan, Keilschriftsprachen (Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian), Coptic, Korean, Latvian, New Arabic, New Greek, New
Hebrew, New Persian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Syriac, Tatar, Tibetan, and Ukrainian.

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According to Madeline Ehrman, the MLAT’s grammatical sensitivity subscale predicts later outcomes best, but C.J. scored in the 50th percentile on this.

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Just a note about this survey: I chose six languages as the limit because of advice from Dick Hudson that five languages
were the most spoken in a community, so people who speak six are outside the norm.

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One major caveat is that the survey draws from people who are online, so the overall makeup of the online population can skew the results. For more detailed discussion of the statistical analysis, please go to
www.babelnomore.com
.

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Because the stroke had killed him instantly and because the hemorrhage was on
the right, not the left, side of the brain, the damage didn’t affect the results of the analysis.

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Musical abilities are also very localized; the library also contains the brain of Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931).

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These are sentences called “dummy subject” sentences, in which the subject of the sentence, the doer of some action, is not in the place where the grammatical subject
is usually found in the sentence. In English: “It is the man who threw the ball.” In Dutch: “
In de krant wordt beweerd dat hij dronken achter het stuur gezeten heeft
.” (“It is claimed in the newspaper that he was drunk while he was driving.”) Dummy subjects are so hard that native speakers can’t describe all the patterns, which aren’t things you learn in school or from books, but only from hearing
and using them.

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Out of deference to their hospitality, I’m going to use only their first names and those of their family throughout this portrait.

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In 1965, riots in the southern state of Madras (later called Tamil Nadu) were sparked when Hindi nearly became the country’s only official language. But there haven’t been language riots in the so-called Dravidian states since the 1980s, and language
nationalism is waning.

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Instances of
Sprachbund
(which in German literally means a “language union”) exist all over the world; famous ones are located in the Balkans, in southern Mexico, and southeast Asia, among others.

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In one school, if their home language was Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, or Hindi, then they had to study Kannada and either Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian.

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I was also limited
to testing Graham’s reading, speaking, and listening, because only these skill areas have been targeted for self-assessment.

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These were Singaporean students being tested on their knowledge of Chinese and English; strictly speaking, exam scores, not abilities, were being compared.

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The
World Atlas of Language Structures
says that the number of consonants in a language ranges from 6 to 122;
the number of vowels ranges between 2 and 14. Rotokas, a language in Papua New Guinea, has only 6 consonants; southern Khoisan, spoken in Botswana, has 122 (many of which are clicks). http://wals.info/feature/1 Yimas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has only 2 vowels, whereas German has 14. http://wals.info/feature/2.

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The topic of word order is more complicated, however, and an appropriately
detailed discussion can be found at http://wals.info/chapter/81.

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Or as the
World Atlas
puts it, there are six “morphemes signalling clausal negation in declarative sentences.” There are multiple other ways to answer a yes-no question in the negative that don’t involve morphemes; see http://wals.info/chapter/112.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise

Description

Author Bio

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Part 1: QUESTION: Into the Cardinal’s Labyrinth