单选题
CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a saint who was
said to speak 72 languages. No one was certain of the true Figure, but it was a
lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away
stunned. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their
language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their
sins the next morning and saved them from hell. Or so the
legend goes. In Babel No More, Michael Erard has written the first serious book
about the people who master vast numbers of languages. A journalist with some
linguistics training, Mr. Erard is not a {{U}}hyperpolyglot{{/U}} himself, but he
approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of
skepticism. To find out whether anyone could really learn so
many languages, Mr. Erard set out to find modern Mezzofantis. The people he
meets are certainly interesting. One man with a mental age of nine has a vast
memory for foreign words and the use of grammatical endings, but he cannot seem
to break free of English word-order. Ken Hale, who was a linguist at MIT and
died in 2001, was said to have learned 50 languages. Professional linguists
still swear by his talent. But he insisted he spoke only three and could merely
"talk" in others. Mr. Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11
languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are
few. Hyperpolyglots are likely to be introverted, which may
come as a surprise to some. Hale's son always said that, in his father's case,
languages were a cloak for a shy man. Emil Krebs, a German diplomat who was
also. credited with knowing dozens of languages, was rude in all of them. He
once refused to speak to his wife for several months because she told him to put
on a winter coat. At the end of his story, however, Erard finds
a surprise in Mezzofanti's archive: flashcards. Stacks of them in twelve
tongues. The world's most celebrated hyperpolyglot relied on the same tools
given to first-year language-learners today. The conclusion? Hyperpolyglots may
begin with talent, but they aren't geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are
tedious to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that
pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at.
单选题
The word "hyperpolyglot" (Para. 2) refers to one who ______.