Free Babel No More by Michael Erard

conversation. * (He passed.) Nevertheless, over his lifetime, many of his linguistic achievements were in the spoken mode—in 1853 he became one of only a dozen Christians to have sneaked into the holy city of Mecca by passing as an Indian Muslim—one possessing fluent, though accented, Arabic. Yet to his military superiors, “knowing” a language was likely to mean knowing its grammatical particularsand its life in texts.
    If time gets in the way of really knowing what someone like Mezzofanti or Burton was capable of, it also helps to explain why the hyperpolyglots of yesteryear seem to be bursting with languages while a modern educated person with a grasp of more than four is a rarity. One can talk about active language skills (talking, writing) and receptive skills (reading, listening);the receptive ones—which even monolinguals may have surprisingly a lot of in other languages—are generally easier to acquire and use. In the era of Mezzofanti and Burton, scholars spent far more time reading and translating texts—in receptive activities, in other words—than they spent communicating with people. I’m not saying that no one talked to other people in foreign languages; I’msayingthat for the people who were going to go around saying they knew language X or Y, one could assume that their legitimate language activities were reading and translating, which are less taxing and stressful to the brain. You can get a lot of support for reading and translating through dictionaries and grammars. To converse without embarrassing yourself, you have to monitor what you hear and what yousay in real time, and not only that, but voices in real life come with accents (which add social information) and environmental noises (which require focus); it’s also a very pragmatics-heavy activity. Thus, in Mezzofanti’s time, it would have been relatively easier to rack up languages, and to do so legitimately, than it would be today, when we seem to treat oral communication as the hallmarkof “knowing” a language.
    Given the variety of historical lenses through which one can view the criteria for speaking or knowing a language, it’s simply impossible to assess definitively the claims about Mezzofanti’s ability in all of his, based on the evidence that Russell provides, anyway.
    An unavoidable conclusion is that a count of one’s languages is, at best, an imperfect convenience fortalking about someone’s capabilities in them. A language isn’t a unit of measure like a kilo or an inch. What is the thing that one has when one has more than one language? Six languages with closely shared vocabulary and grammar don’t burden one’s memory or mental processing as much as six unrelated languages would. Likewise, six languages in which one can speak, read, and write don’t representthe same sort of cognitive investment for an adult learner as six languages in which one has varying degrees of proficiency across a variety of tasks.
    So what’s another way for us to grasp the scope of someone’s “cognitive investment”? Here are some possibilities.
    A folk notion is that when you dream in a language, you’ve crossed some threshold on a path to fluency. In the 1980s, Canadian psychologistJoseph De Koninck found that students of French who made the fastest progress were those who reported speaking French in their dreams sooner than fellow students. Among another group of students studying French, those who had more REM (rapid eye movement) sleep over the course of a six-week immersion program improved the most. Forpeople who have more experience in their languages, perhaps thisisn’t a workable measurement alternative, since bilinguals report that they speak, think, and hear in both of their languages. Often, what determines their dream language is the one they used right before they slept, not the one they know the best.
    A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn’t think