Free Babel No More by Michael Erard Page A

in any language. What people refer toas “thinking in a language” comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it’s closer to its source in the brain.
    Does speaking in a different language alter one’s perception? Can the structure of a language and the way its vocabulary maps meanings make the world morecolorful, your friends more friendly, the trees wilder? The “linguistic relativity hypothesis,” or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it’s alternately called, proposes that the language you speak actually molds your perception of the world. Quite literally, if two languages have a different range of color words, the person speaking both languages fluently will assign his perception of colors to two differentnames and perhaps categories. If that’s true, then the hyperpolyglot’s world must appear kaleidoscopic. Indeed, scientists have observed monolingual speakers of Korean using a term, paran sekj, or “blue,” to refer to a greener, less purple color than Korean-English bilinguals think of as “blue.” Other scientists have since seen how bilinguals categorize common containers and even conceptualizetime differently from monolinguals. But this evidence is controversial, and the effects of language on cognition haven’t been isolated precisely.
    One question that polyglots don’t get asked is, “When you go crazy, what language do you go crazy in?” Which is too bad, because it’s been demonstrated that psychotic polyglots, it turns out, aren’t equally disordered in each of their languages. Inone case recorded by British psychiatrist Felicity de Zulueta, her psychotic patient, a native English speaker, switched into Spanish because he knew that Zulueta also spoke the language. Both were then surprised that his hallucinations and disordered thoughts disappeared. “In Spanish . . . he felt he was ‘sane,’ but when hespoke in English, he went ‘mad,’” Zulueta wrote. In three other cases,Zulueta’s patients had disordered thoughts or heard voices in the language they had learned first and used most. Using a language that they spoke less frequently overall and learned later dismissed their delusions. In another case, a patient was equally psychotic in Italian and English, but heard voices only in Italian, her mother tongue. Not only that—in English she denied that she heard voicesat all, whereas in Italian, she readily admitted hearing them. Other patients hear friendly voices in their native languages, hostile ones in their second languages. A subsequent researcher quipped that the more competent an insane person was in a language, the higher their degree of psychosis.
    Some scientists have suggested that the extra effort of using a second language jolts people out ofa deluded state into reality. Others suggest that the deeper relationship to your first language makes you less inhibited, and so more likely to express what’s troubling you. In a language learned later, you can hide from your true self.
    People are unlikely to tell potential employers that they can be mentally unbalanced in two languages and unstable in a third, or that they dream in three languagesbut never in a fourth. Which underscores the convenience, in comparison, of counting hyperpolyglots’ languages and what they can actually use them for.
    Your opinion of Mezzofanti may also depend on how valuable you think a less-than-complete knowledge of a language is. I’m talking about more than a snippet or a bit, more than an exchange of pleasantries or asking for bus directions. A good workingknowledge of the core of the language, one that allows you to have real interactions to achieve some purpose, albeit in a limited domain, is what’s at issue here.
    In the Western conception of what it means to know a language, these circumscribed abilities don’t seem to count for much. The dominant view seems to be