To find out whether anyone could really learn so many languages, Mr Erard set out to find modern Mezzofantis. The people he meets are certainly interesting. One man with a mental age of nine has a vast memory for foreign words and the use of grammatical endings, but he cannot seem to break free of English word-order. Ken Hale, who was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died in 2001, was said to have learned 50 languages, including notoriously difficult Finnish while on a flight to Helsinki. Professional linguists still swear by his talent. But he insisted he spoke only three (English, Spanish and Warlpiri—from Australia's Northern Territory) and could merely "talk in" others.
为了弄清是否真有人能够学如此多的语言,Erard先生启程去寻找现代的“Mezzofantis”。他果真遇到了有趣之人。一个心理年龄仅9岁的男子拥有大量关于外语单词和词尾的记忆,但似乎不能打破英语词序的思维定式。另据说Ken Hale,这位于2011年去世的麻省理工学院的语言学家,生前学习了50种语言,甚至在一架飞往赫尔辛基的航班上学会被公认极难的芬兰语。语言专家们至今仍对他的天赋确信无疑。而他本人确坚称自己只会三门语言(英语,西班牙语和沃匹利语——来自于澳洲北领地),而对于其它语言,聊聊尚可。
Mr Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few. Ziad Fazah, raised in Lebanon and now living in Brazil, once held the Guinness world record for 58 languages. But when surprised on a Chilean television show by native speakers, he utterly flubbed questions in Finnish, Mandarin, Farsi and Russian (including "What day is it today?" in Russian), a failure that lives in infamy on YouTube. Perhaps he was a fraud; perhaps he simply had a miserable day. Hyperpolyglots must warm up or "prime" their weaker languages, with a few hours' or days' practice, to use them comfortably. Switching quickly between more than around six or seven is near-impossible even for the most gifted.
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2020-09-15
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