Michael Erard
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"Babel No More"
Out of the blue today dropped this awesome review of Babel No More from Kirkus Reviews:
BABEL NO MORE
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Author: Erard, Michael
Erard (Um…: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, 2007) reports the results of his attempts to locate people who are [...]
Continue Reading →My essay in the New York Times today is the product of a month’s worth of naptimes. The baby’s, that is, not my own. I have to say, though, that my dreams over the first year of his life have been so vivid and intense, every night packed with dreamtime craziness, probably because the [...]
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Please help me check this, and send me email with corrections/suggestions. For my hyperpolyglot book, I’m trying to give people a sense of the location of Broca’s, Wernicke’s, and associated language networks by mapping them onto the globe. The brain isn’t a sphere; it’s more ovoid. This means the placements are approximate, but they’re meant [...]
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Historical polyglots: Jeremiah Curtin, Joseph Mezzofanti, Barthold Niebuhr, Johann Baratier, Conon Gabelentz, and Georg Gabelentz.
I love the Even More Amazing trope of these descriptions (which I need to rename): there was this guy, but he couldn’t match this guy, and even more incredible was this guy, who was surpassed by this guy. (All guys, [...]
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Walking today along the Eastern Promenade’s lower trail, I stopped by the Yacht Services to show Iver (in my backpack) a boomtruck that was stacking floats, an autumn task. The kid loves wheels and trucks, and the older man and woman who had also been checking out the truck, loved the baby, made googly eyes, [...]
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Dick Hudson sent me this WSJ article about Ellen Jovin, who is trying to outdo Katherine Russell Rich (of Dreaming in Hindi fame) and Deborah Fallows (of Dreaming in Chinese fame) by learning 13 languages in 3 years. From the article, I gather that’s Italian, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, [...]
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I’m ecstatic to report that Babel No More, my book about hyperpolyglots, has been sold to Free Press/Simon & Schuster; I’ll be working with Hilary Redmon, who’s published a number of neuroscience books and is interested in things language and who has also worked with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Tammett (who appears in the [...]
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One of the best (and, sadly, only) stories I’ve read in a while about interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan is this piece by Neil Shea on NPR/Foreign Policy. What’s so great about it is the way he shows how progress (if that’s the word to use) on the ground depends not on the number [...]
Continue Reading →Researching my previous post on the web, I came across an Austrian-born, NY-based conceptual artist, Rainer Ganahl, who works in and around languages — not in the way artists usually do (contrasting text with image) but getting at the political and cultural conditions for learning and speaking certain languages. This is very exciting for me, [...]
Continue Reading →Babel No More is a scientific book — not in the sense that it’s laden with charts and figures, and not because the action takes place in laboratories, but because it attempts to provide reliable information about language superlearners, that is, information that’s not self-reported or anecdotal, but that can be verified, compared, and synthesized [...]
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