polyglot[pol・y・glot] 
- 発音記号[pɑ'liglɑ`t | pɔ'liglɔ`t]
数か国語対訳辞典.
The Art of Mastering Many Tongues
By PETER CONSTANTINE
Published: January 20, 2012
Among the most surprising qualities of “Babel No More,” Michael Erard’s globe-trekking adventure in search of the world’s virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is — part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time.
BABEL NO MORE
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
By Michael Erard
Illustrated. 306 pp. Free Press. $25.99.
How is it, Erard asks, that certain people are able to accumulate what for the average person is a daunting number of languages? What are the secrets of polyglots who can master 6, 26, 96 languages? What are their quirks and attitudes? Are their brains wired differently from ours?
Erard, a journalist who writes frequently on language and whose previous book was “Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” begins by visiting Bologna, Italy, the hometown of one of history’s most distinguished polyglots, the 19th-century cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti. The cardinal is said to have known 45, 50, 58 or even more languages, depending on whom you ask. Victorian travelers who met him at ecclesiastical banquets reported that he affably conversed in all directions with foreign visitors in languages ranging from French, German and Arabic to Algonquin and “Californian.” (Lord Byron, who challenged the cardinal to a multilingual contest of profanities, was not only summarily defeated but walked away from the contest having learned a number of new Cockney gibes.) No less a figure than Pope Gregory XVI, in an attempt to catch Mezzofanti out, orchestrated a prank in which he secretly gathered dozens of foreign seminarians and then unleashed them on the unsuspecting cleric, all of them addressing him loudly in a tangle of languages. With much aplomb, Mezzofanti took up the pontiff’s challenge, answered them, and prevailed.
Mezzofanti is a beguiling character. Erard has combed through the cardinal’s archives in Bologna for clues about his practices and proficiency, and “Babel No More” is, among other things, a quest to see what benefits Mezzofanti’s strategies might offer us.
Erard is a “monolingual with benefits,” as he calls himself, “more than a monoglot, much less than a polyglot.” English is his native tongue, and he has learned Spanish, Chinese and Italian at varying levels of proficiency. Here he talks to several world specialists in polyglottery, asking simple but effective questions in an effort to define “multilingual” beyond, say, the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary: “Using or having the ability to use several languages.” How many languages does one have to speak to be considered a polyglot? (At least six seems the consensus.) What does it really mean to speak a language? Knowing a few phrases? Giving a cabdriver directions? Debating politics? Claire Kramsch, a linguist Erard consults, provides wise insight: “Asking how many languages you know is only asking half the question. You should also ask, ‘In how many languages do you live?’ ”
Linguists warn Erard that some self-proclaimed polyglots may say they speak any number of languages, when in fact most of them know only a few grammatical rules, and have only a smattering of ready words and phrases. True polyglots, we are told, find it difficult to say precisely how many languages they speak, since their many languages hover unavoidably at different levels of proficiency. And what does fluency mean? Does an American who has learned Polish as a second language need to be able to pass for a Pole in Warsaw to be considered fluent? As Erard notes, this is a feat very few can manage.
“Babel No More” introduces the generation of polyglots who came after Mezzofanti, and some of today’s foremost language gatherers. To Erard’s surprise, he initially had a hard time tracking them down. The remarkable Erik Gunnemark, who could translate from 47 languages — “though for 20 of them he needed dictionaries” — died just before Erard managed to meet him. Ziad Fazah, once listed in Guinness World Records as speaking 56 languages, was crossed off Erard’s list when, on a Chilean television show, he failed to understand even the simplest sentences that speakers of various languages said to him. (The Russian speaker asked, “What day is today?” This drew a blank.)
Eventually, traveling from Berkeley to Hyderabad, from Chihuahua to Düsseldorf, Erard does have success. One polyglot he meets, Alexander Arguelles, who lives in Berkeley “on unemployment checks and Korean translation work,” shows that anyone who hopes to achieve fluency in more than six languages must dedicate himself to the task rigorously — in fact almost exclusively. Arguelles keeps his languages in shape by subjecting himself to an unforgiving schedule, keeping spreadsheets that record the hours and minutes he spends on each one. Arguelles “tracks his linguistic progress through the hours as saints once cataloged their physical self-sacrifices,” Erard writes. Of 4,454 hours of language study Arguelles did over a period of 456 days, he spent 456 hours on his native language, English, and also 456 on Arabic, and then a descending number of hours on the remaining 50 languages on his spreadsheet. Though his learning techniques may seem strange, they also appear to be effective. In one, called “shadowing,” students listen to language recordings on a portable player while briskly walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically as they shout out the foreign words and phrases they are listening to. Though one is bound to make a spectacle of oneself, this technique seems to help the beginner shed some of the self-consciousness connected with speaking a foreign language.
Eventually, in a section called “Revelation: The Brain Whispers,” Erard ventures into the field of neurolinguistics to see how the language prodigy’s brain may be physiologically different from the average one. We are presented with a wide spectrum of neurological information that aims to pinpoint the cognitive abilities involved in learning languages, and the areas of the brain that jump into action when language comes into play. Erard doesn’t shy from controversial questions: Are there links between Asperger’s and hyperpolyglottery? Are most polyglots left-handed, musical men who can’t drive? He also sets out to find the brain of Emil Krebs (1867-1930), a German hyperpolyglot who was said to know some 65 languages. (He tracks it down at the University of Düsseldorf, and it reveals many secrets.)
To me, Erard’s experiences in India were particularly interesting. There he met polyglots from families and communities that are ethnically and linguistically mixed, and who therefore speak many languages out of necessity rather than an urge to accumulate. This leads him to distinguish between the multilingual and the hyperpolyglot, or the purely acquisitive language learner. “For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society,” he writes. “There’s no motive, no separable ‘will to plasticity’ that’s distinct from what it means to be part of that society.” But “being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot’s pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community.”
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