SNP’s word of the day: Hyperpolyglot

Date January 3, 2012

Word: Hyperpolyglot

Meaning: Someone who’s mastered a vast number of languages. Like, more than 10.

Usage: “Did Mezzofanti have an extraordinary brain? Or are hyper-polyglots just ordinary people with ordinary brains who manage to do something extraordinary through motivation and hard work?” –from The Five-Minute Linguist

You should know it because: There’s a new book on hyperglottery, Babel No More, by the linguistically impassioned journalist Michael Erard. Said book is detailed in this week’s Economist, which is something I like to read when I very suddenly need to be smarter. Did you know that Cardinal Mezzofanti, a 19th-century secular saint in Bologna, once learned a language overnight just to translate a confession for two condemned prisoners and save them from hell? Or that Emil Krebs, an early 20th-century German diplomat who knew dozens of languages, once stopped using any of them to speak to his wife for months—months!—because she told him to put on a coat?

I found a list of suspected hyperpolyglots, and they’re all male, which might be because the gift of multi-multi-linguism is found in “extreme male brains.” (The same is said of autism.) But elsewhere, I found this one Hungarian translator, a woman, who learned to speak 16 languages during the Cold War. You can read almost as many theories about extraordinary linguists as there are languages, but here’s one more: Some people try a lot harder than others.