Quot linguæ, tot homines

[Update of a post from January 2012]

[And, a rhyming version: 

   Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales.
   Karl Vossler's version:  "So viel Sprachen einer kann, so viel mal ist er ein Mensch."
(Replace Mensch by Mann, and you get a rhyming version of that.]

A venerable Latin tag, but I don’t really buy it.  If you spread yourself too thin, you run aground in the shallows:  there is no intellectual depth in maintaining a brain-deck of file-cards à la  book = Buch = livre = libro = kitâb …;  and the question, “How many languages do you speak?”  always makes me grind my teeth. (“No more than one at a time,” I sometimes growl.)  Pursuing multilingualism as a fetish  smacks of calculating-savants, quiz-winners, and that ilk.  Antiquity had its Mithridates of Pontus;  the ottocento, its Cardinal Mezzofanti:  but these polyglots were by no means philologists.

Nonetheless:

There is a quiditas, a je-ne-sais-quoi, a haeccéité  or quintessence, in each linguistic culture, sui generis and untranslatable.   To steep yourself deeply in these, particularly in a language with a long and intricate written history, like Latin or Arabic, or (at somewhat shallower time-depth, but overtaking those in later laps) English, German, or French.  Both at work and in my free time, I use other languages (a different mix depending on the context)  nearly as much as I use English, and am the better for it.   But the point is to go deep, one culture at a time, and not to display some multilingual multitasking like simultaneous tournament chess.   I know many people employed as linguists  who have never read through an entire book in the language that they work with, beyond Harry Potter in translation.  That seems sad.

Anyhow, here is a review, from this morning’s New York Times, of a book on multilingualism, Babel No More, which makes a useful distinction between multilinguals and hyperpolyglots.

(And for a beautiful and elaborate painted depiction of that ancient toppled tower, along with some entertaining philology, click here.)

[Update 18 March 2012] More ammo, from a staff writer of Science:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?scp=2&sq=bhattacharjee&st=cse

A propos:

Hugo Schuchardt, best known as a Romance philologist, but who studied a remarkable range of languages, not excluding Basque and Berber, and indeed Arabic (which he traveled to Egypt to master) nonetheless wrote:

Wir glauben nicht an den Segen der Zweisprachigkeit;  wenn man mit Recht gesagt hat, qu’une population qui parle deux langues, a deux cordes à son arc, so hat man vergessen hinzuzufügen, daß keine dieser Sehnen  sehr straff ist.

-- Romanisches und Keltisches (1886), repr. in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 363

Note that this assessment did not, however, prevent him from pioneering the study of the neither-this-or-that Mischsprachen known as creoles;  he even put in a good word for those culturally decidedly slack-stringed confections -- not foam-born but test-tube-engendered -- the artificial entities Esperanto and Volapük.

[Update Oct 2014]
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/more-languages-better-brain/381193/

[Update Dec 2019]

The cool eye  and tart tongue  of Rebecca West  opines, in her Balkan travelogue:

…one of those strange polyglots  who seem to have been brought up in some alley  where several civilizations  pour out their ash-cans, since only bits and pieces have come their way, never the real meat.
-- Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p.707

.

Feu le roi (mort assassiné, 1934)

the   strange, soft   sound

of a whole      city

                       weeping …

[From: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p. 616]

Yaitse, 1936: Tableaux

When I awoke       and saw the sun

a pale-green blaze     in the treetops

~

watching water     clear as air

comb straight      the green weeds on the piers

[From: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p. 425]

Phrase of the Day: “I’m from Missouri”

The English writer Rebecca West, in her Balkan travelogue:

There has been  in America  a wave of cynicism, entirely mindless, destitute of all content, save “Oh, year” and “So what”, which, by a strange twist, results in a bland acceptance of the whole universe  that has never been surprassed by Christian Scientists.  An automatic skepticism regarding stories of atrocities  leads to a rosy belief that every member of an invading army  behaves with the courtesy of a cinema theatre usher.

-- Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), p. 773

 

“You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese  immediately  by his skepticism.”

“I’m a skeptic.”

“No, you’re only incredulous, a doubter, and that’s different.”

-- Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)

[below: repost of an essay from Feb 2016]

Throughout most of my lifetime,  the American two-party system has met little serious challenge.  (“Third parties are like bees:  they sting, and then they die.”)  That hasn’t yet really changed (anyone seen the Tea Party of late?):  even the floridly contrarian candidates Trump and Sanders  chose a major-party banner to run under (or in Trump’s case, perhaps to trample underfoot).   Yet the public mood is indeed evolving -- souring, mostly -- even if not in a way that so far has managed to embody itself in an organized party with a positive platform.  The movement is essentially negative, or rather a congeries of semi-related negatives.

The phenomenon is not unexampled in our nation’s history.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson came, for a time, to be the seed around which contrarian sentiments nucleated:

Jacksonianism was … a “persuasion”, a set of attitudes  united by little save discontent.

-- Wilson McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973)

A prominent feature of the present mood, is simply not believing what the government tells you (nor indeed anyone perceived as somehow working for the government, such as climate scientists).   And alas there has been much matter, indicative of the wisdom of examining their statements from this angle and that, and reserving judgment --  though surely politicians are no more egregiously peccant in this respect, than beleaguered generals, gossipy neighbors, ex-wives, and anyone trying to sell you something.

Again we notice widespread nineteenth-century precedents:

Missouri's nickname is The Show Me State. There are several stories concerning the origin of the "Show Me" slogan. The most widely known story gives credit to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver for coining the phrase in 1899. During a speech in Philadelphia, he said:

"I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."

http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/missouri/state-nickname/show-me-state

(Melville features a relatively hard-to-bamboozle character called the “Man from Missouri”  in his enigmatic 1857 sotie The Confidence Man.)

He's from Missouri

So far as that goes, it is an expression of healthy skepticism.   The implication is that the speaker is open to being shown, given well-marshalled evidence.

A rung lower than this, this classic expression of popular disbelief:

“Sez you” became the cry of millions.

-- D. W. Brogan, The American Character (1944), p. 92

(Mostly among men.   For women, a couple of generations later, the catchphrase was a less chin-out pugnacious, but even more utterly dismissive “What-ev-vahh…”)

Or again, the Studs Lonigans of the day:

He may fall back on “Oh, yeah” or the more adequate “however you slice it, it’s still baloney.”

-- D. W. Brogan, The American Character (1944), p. 164

(Cf. the classic cartoon caption  “I say it’s broccoli, and I say the hell with it.”)

Such folks are, unlike the Missourian, not inviting you to “show them” anything;  but in many such cases, attitudes are still subject to change,  not perhaps via reasoned argument, but by such dramatic images as may eventuate.

Rungs below that  is the attitude of systematic disbelief  that scarcely deserves the name of “skepticism” at all, for it simply does not engage in the practice of evidence-and-argument.  Birthers, alien-abductionists, conspiracy-theorists of various stripes, are no progeny of Diogenes;  and their abstraction from the world of fact  would have baffled Aristotle.

~

For more on genuine skepticism versus lazy know-nothingism:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/05/chaos-coincidence-conspiracy.html