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Authors: Michael Erard
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responses that you’d have to conclude that a native speaker’s opinion isn’t necessarily a legitimate criterion.
An even bigger problem is that one person’s “nativeness” in language X isn’t necessarily the same as another’s. Any close look at a speech community demonstrates that pronunciations, vocabularies, and grammarsare heterogeneous across social divides, genders, and geographical areas. Two speakers of two dialects would both be considered native speakers, even though they might not be able to describe how their version differs from the standard—and though they might judge the other speaker’s variety as somehow wrong or incorrect. In sign languages, the problem is profound. If you define a native speakeras someone who uses a language from birth at home, then there are hardly any native signers, since the majority of deaf children are born to hearing, nonsigning parents. (I’m speculating, but perhaps this is why sign language courses are so popular in the United States, where college enrollments went up more than 16 percent from 2006 to 2009: though there’s a robust deaf culture, there’s no nativesigning community to which one, by definition, can’t ever belong.) Russell, the biographer of Mezzofanti, never says what sort of native speaker he’s gathering evidence from.
Even if you could presume that each native speaker knows the same things that other natives know, it is a shallow standard, because one can pronounce words like a native speaker and also lack linguistic creativity. Confusedwith a real speaker, the mere mimic gets labeled as a “master” simply because she’s able to string together words uninterruptedly as if she knows what she’s doing. What’s often called “fluency” might be no more than confidence (or blitheness). It’s possible that Mezzofanti only ever aspired to “passing” in most of his languages. One piece of evidence for this is his clear phonetic enthusiasm,which Russell stingingly noted when describing Mezzofanti’s English (the italics are his): “If I were disposed to criticize it very strictly,” the Irishman wrote, “I might say (paradoxical as this may seem,) that, compared with the enunciation of a native, it was almost too correct to appear completely natural .”
Less obviously, Mezzofanti’s social rank would have restricted an accurate read ofhis abilities. His meetings were probably fairly formal, which would have reduced unexpected or intimate topics. He could have controlled the meetings, too, so that none of them would endanger his linguistic reputation. Who would dare report that a person of such status couldn’t actually do what he claimed?
And the Mezzofanti of legend grew in other directions. Travelers to Italy who embarkedon the so-called Grand Tour sought out Catholic excesses that fascinated and disgusted them. Their accounts would have drawn Mezzofanti as a Romantic figure, a symbol of Catholicism’s vivacious ruin. In response, the Church would have asserted the opposite. Mezzofanti represented the Church’s ideal view of itself—conservative, theologically pure, and world-encircling—an image embedded in hagiographieslike Russell’s.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that judgments of “mastery” vary from era to era and to assume that the “fluency” and “mastery” of the eighteenth century would mean the same now that they meant then. Only a small bit of digging turns this on its head. In 1875, for instance, knowing French to the satisfaction of Harvard College meant you could translate at sight “easy” Frenchprose. You didn’t have to orate or converse in it or demonstrate your understanding with a French speaker.
Another example comes from the life of the adventuring hyperpolyglotSir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). To show his British military superiors that he knew Hindustani, he had to translate two Hindustani books into English, translate a handwritten text, write a short essay, and havea
An even bigger problem is that one person’s “nativeness” in language X isn’t necessarily the same as another’s. Any close look at a speech community demonstrates that pronunciations, vocabularies, and grammarsare heterogeneous across social divides, genders, and geographical areas. Two speakers of two dialects would both be considered native speakers, even though they might not be able to describe how their version differs from the standard—and though they might judge the other speaker’s variety as somehow wrong or incorrect. In sign languages, the problem is profound. If you define a native speakeras someone who uses a language from birth at home, then there are hardly any native signers, since the majority of deaf children are born to hearing, nonsigning parents. (I’m speculating, but perhaps this is why sign language courses are so popular in the United States, where college enrollments went up more than 16 percent from 2006 to 2009: though there’s a robust deaf culture, there’s no nativesigning community to which one, by definition, can’t ever belong.) Russell, the biographer of Mezzofanti, never says what sort of native speaker he’s gathering evidence from.
Even if you could presume that each native speaker knows the same things that other natives know, it is a shallow standard, because one can pronounce words like a native speaker and also lack linguistic creativity. Confusedwith a real speaker, the mere mimic gets labeled as a “master” simply because she’s able to string together words uninterruptedly as if she knows what she’s doing. What’s often called “fluency” might be no more than confidence (or blitheness). It’s possible that Mezzofanti only ever aspired to “passing” in most of his languages. One piece of evidence for this is his clear phonetic enthusiasm,which Russell stingingly noted when describing Mezzofanti’s English (the italics are his): “If I were disposed to criticize it very strictly,” the Irishman wrote, “I might say (paradoxical as this may seem,) that, compared with the enunciation of a native, it was almost too correct to appear completely natural .”
Less obviously, Mezzofanti’s social rank would have restricted an accurate read ofhis abilities. His meetings were probably fairly formal, which would have reduced unexpected or intimate topics. He could have controlled the meetings, too, so that none of them would endanger his linguistic reputation. Who would dare report that a person of such status couldn’t actually do what he claimed?
And the Mezzofanti of legend grew in other directions. Travelers to Italy who embarkedon the so-called Grand Tour sought out Catholic excesses that fascinated and disgusted them. Their accounts would have drawn Mezzofanti as a Romantic figure, a symbol of Catholicism’s vivacious ruin. In response, the Church would have asserted the opposite. Mezzofanti represented the Church’s ideal view of itself—conservative, theologically pure, and world-encircling—an image embedded in hagiographieslike Russell’s.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that judgments of “mastery” vary from era to era and to assume that the “fluency” and “mastery” of the eighteenth century would mean the same now that they meant then. Only a small bit of digging turns this on its head. In 1875, for instance, knowing French to the satisfaction of Harvard College meant you could translate at sight “easy” Frenchprose. You didn’t have to orate or converse in it or demonstrate your understanding with a French speaker.
Another example comes from the life of the adventuring hyperpolyglotSir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890). To show his British military superiors that he knew Hindustani, he had to translate two Hindustani books into English, translate a handwritten text, write a short essay, and havea
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