language masters (NY Times)

[Jane A. Edwards]

Perhaps of interest, from the NYT.
-Jane Edwards
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New York Times, (12/31/97), p. C21.

 To Masters of Language, a Long Overdue Toast

By WILLIAM H. HONAN

      NEW YORK -- Each vocation or avocation has its Babe Ruths and
Baryshnikovs, and so it is with the Linguistic Society of America.
The champion is Francis Sommer, fluent in 94 languages.
Sommer, who died in 1978, grew up in Speyer, Germany, amusing
himself by inventing languages. While still a schoolboy, he learned
Swedish, Sanskrit and Persian. On a visit to Russia, he picked up all
the major European languages. By the late 1920s, after emigrating to
the United States, where he found work as a research librarian at the
Cleveland Public Library, he knew nearly eight dozen languages.

There were no Olympic medals or Nobel prizes for him, but that is a
mistake that should be rectified, said scholars coming to New York
City on Jan. 8 and 9 for the annual convention of the Linguistic
Society of America.

"People like Sommer are amazing examples of human achievement,
and just as unusual as those who do the decathlon," said David
Perlmutter, a professor of linguistics at the University
of California at San Diego.

Language acquisition will be a major topic of discussion at the
convention. Linguists are teaming up with psychologists and students
of the brain to understand how a high school student from Brooklyn
learns to speak French.

Other linguists are focused on language preservation, contending that
endangered languages like various American Indian and aboriginal
Australian languages must be saved for the same reason that
biologists seek to protect endangered species. The diversity helps
understand the structure of all languages, they maintain.

Strangely, linguists say, they know of no one who has made a
scientific study of master linguists like Sommer or
Harold Williams, a New Zealand journalist who died in 1928  and
is listed (incorrectly) in the Guinness Book of Records as
the world's greatest linguist, though
Somers mastered almost twice as many languages. Williams, who
spoke 58 languages, showed off his talent by conversing with every
delegate to the League of Nations in his or her native tongue.

Many polyglot professors wince at being called superhuman.
"It's more like a musical talent than anything else," said Kenneth
Hale, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who speaks about 50 languages. "I didn't do very well as
a student. I wanted to learn languages, and I let everything else
slide."

Their motivation, they say, is the sheer delight of mastering a new
form of expression.
"When I found I could speak Navajo at the age of 12," Hale said, "I
used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself."
Perlmutter explained the fascination this way: "Each new language is
like a fantastic puzzle and you want to learn how to do it. Sometimes
it's easy because if you know English plus German, it's easy to learn
Dutch. If you know Spanish and one other Romance language,
Portuguese comes quickly. But of course, that doesn't work with
Japanese."

Stephen Wurm, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the Australian
National University at Canberra who knows 48 languages, including
one spoken in Papua New Guinea that he considers the world's most
difficult, said the ideal way to learn a language was to have it spoken
to you beginning at the age of 2.

"The members of my family all came from different backgrounds and
spoke several languages," he said. "When I was growing up, my
father, who was a linguist himself, insisted that each member of the
family speak to me in only one language. So my father spoke to me
only in English, his father in Norwegian and his mother in Finnish.
My mother spoke to me only in Hungarian and her mother only in
Mongolian. That way I never got confused.

"Then I traveled with my father to his postings in Germany, Russia,
China, Argentina and Turkey, so that by the age of 6, I spoke 10
different languages."

Hale said he could never learn a language in a classroom.
"For me, it's got to be done with another person on a one-to-one
basis," he said. "I start with parts of the body and common animals
and objects. I learn nouns. Then I pick up the sound system. I write
that down.

"If it's not a written language, like Nggoth, which is spoken in
Australia, I make up how to write it. I can learn that in one or two
hours. Then I start making complex sentences because the complex
sentences are more regular than the simple ones. Then pretty soon I
can name anything in the world."

Sommer left pointers in the textbooks he wrote about learning
Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and German. But he was a better
student than a teacher. When explaining how to speak Russian, for
example, he offered advice that must have left many readers tongue-
tied. For example: "Try to pronounce 'es' while holding the tongue in
the position required for 'oo."'

It would be a mistake to think of master linguists as shy, retiring
bookworms. Edgar Erskine Hume, an American Army officer who
died in 1952, spoke at least 10 languages and was unmistakably a
man of action. He fought in World War I and World War II, and held
two Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star with two clusters,
the Legion of Merit, three Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart with
two clusters.

Speaking many languages has not always been a ticket to success. At
least once -- in the case of Edgar Tibbetts -- it proved a liability.
A self-effacing federal clerk who died in 1908, Tibbetts was
employed by the Surgeon General's office in Washington. Modestly,
he let it be known that he was fluent in 10 languages. That was not
the half of it: He could translate from German, French, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish,
Russian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Romanian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish,
Chinese and Japanese.

In 1904, he applied for a transfer to the Bureau of Military
Information, where translators were paid a few dollars more than his
$1,400-a-year salary. When his superior caught wind of his
restlessness, Tibbetts wrote a letter to his own boss, saying that he
was "indispensable because of his ability to translate from certain
languages" and that his loss would "cripple the work of indexing."
That put an end to his aspirations. Four years later, while riding his
bicycle home from work, he collided with a horse-drawn wagon and
was killed.

Some master linguists confess that they live in fear of garbling the
various tongues in which they speak. Toward the end of his life,
Sommer said he had given up learning new languages because he
was experiencing information overload.

"I am afraid to cram any more words into my head," he told an
interviewer. "Either the top will come off or some morning I will
wake up speaking Babel."

Likewise, Hale said he sometimes started speaking in one language
and found himself unconsciously drifting into another.
"Unless I'm attentive and really on the ball," he said, "I can mix up
languages like Miskitu and Sumu, both of which are spoken in
Central America and are very similar."

Then he added with a professorial chuckle, "But I could never
confuse Navajo with Warlpiri. Ho, ho, ho. Never with Warlpiri!"

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