A recent obituary of Martin Bernal (“sinologist, historian and political scientist”) included the statement that

He treated language learning as both a duty and a pleasure: in addition to fluency in French and Chinese, he knew Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Italian, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chichewa [a Bantu language spoken in parts of Malawi] and several ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern languages.

I would like to think that this is an attitude I share. The difference, I fear, is that language learning does not come particularly easy to me.  All right, I can communicate with varying degrees of proficiency in some ten languages, but I have to really work at it. Even my decent GCSE pass in Turkish doesn’t mean I can relax; a few weeks before heading off to Turkey I have to get out the I-Pod and listen and listen to recordings, just to get back to the same level, let alone improve.

True polyglots (and that is what I imagine Martin Bernal to have been) often seem to acquire languages with great ease, a skill that I envy more than any other. I recall reading an obituary of another academic a while back. His name escapes me, but what struck me most forcibly was an anecdote about a time when he was invited as keynote speaker to a conference in one of the central Asian parts of the former USSR.  A few weeks before setting off, he arranged to have a number of lessons at SOAS in the main language of the country; which he used to give his opening address. Not only that: by the end of the week he had acquired enough of that country’s second most important language to use it for his closing address.  Uncanny.

Whether this man could have passed as a native speaker of the languages in question is unlikely, though not impossible.  But this is a skill that an earlier polyglot, Richard Francis Burton (described in Wikipedia as a geographer, explorer, translator, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat), needed to possess if he valued his life.  For, in the mid 1850s, he was accepted as a fellow Arabic speaking Muslim on a caravan of pilgrims heading to Mecca for the annual Haj, a feat requiring great courage, if not foolhardiness.  (See the photograph above).

(To learn more about  “Eminent polyglots” go to “Syzgycc’s Channel” on YouTube where, among other things, he has a series of videos talking about the likes of Burton, Pimsleur, Champollion and so on. Here’s a link to his piece on Burton)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4ESqgdboY

I have only once met someone with that apparently effortless gift for acquiring languages which I envy so much.  This was a man called James (Jim) Algeo, a professor of Linguistics, who taught with me on a summer school for Rumanian teachers of languages (English, French, German, Russian) held in the little Transylvanian town of Sinaia in 1970.

Jim’s first two languages were Spanish and Portuguese, which he gradually expanded into the other romance languages, leaving just Rumanian which he rapidly acquired by teaching at Bucharest University at the time we met.  (He was also interested in the various dialects of the languages he knew.  I once met a man from Buenos Aires who, on meeting Jim, was convinced that he had to be from that city, a place where he had stayed no more than a week.)

But his interest was not confined to romance languages. During that first year in Bucharest he had spent two or three weeks of the Easter vacation in Greece, which enabled him - as I can testify - to step in and interpret for a Greek visitor who was trying in vain to make himself understood, in hesitant English, by the Rumanian desk clerk at our hotel. Greek-Rumanian-Greek-Rumanian.

Not just that. In that same academic year he had spent a fortnight in what was still Yugoslavia, where he had picked up the main Slavonic language spoken in that country.  Now this may seem hard to believe but, during the course of an evening’s hard drinking with the guys from the Russian delegation, Jim gradually started producing ever longer sequences in their language (from the same family as Serbo-Croat, but far from being mutually intelligible) while I could barely come out with ’tovarich’ (comrade) and ‘Na sdarovie’ (cheers).  Now that is really not fair.  Where were the good language fairies when I was born?

(Of course, not every polyglot finds things that easy. For what is described as ‘a polyglot’s daily linguistic workout’, see the following video.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oudgdh6tl00&feature=fvw