Back in February I posted about Michael Erard’s travails in (re)titling his book on hyperpolyglots, Babel No More (subtitle: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners) for his UK publisher, Gerald Duckworth. Duckworth’s disliked the American main title and argued for Superlinguists instead, but Michael (and other linguists, including me) objected. In the end, he thought they’d settled on Mezzofanti’s Gift as the main title. Now Michael has written me about the amazon.uk page for the book, which has this illustration:
But the page lists the book title as:
Mezzofanti’s Gift: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
I can’t wait to see what the book actually looks like.
Duckworth set off a literary alarm for me. From Wikipedia:
Gerald de l’Etang Duckworth (1870 – 28 September 1937) was a British publisher.
… Duckworth’s father died before his birth, and when he was eight his mother married the author Leslie Stephen, and had four more children: Virginia Stephen, later the author Virginia Woolf, the painter Vanessa Bell, and two sons, Thoby and Adrian Stephen. Woolf eventually accused Gerald and his elder brother, George, of having sexually abused her and Vanessa when they were children and teenagers. Nevertheless, Woolf published her first two novels with her brother’s help before forming the Hogarth Press.
Bloomsbury days.
March 19, 2013 at 8:15 am |
From Michael:
March 19, 2013 at 3:04 pm |
From Michael Berch on Google+”
March 21, 2013 at 2:53 am |
The word linguist is in fact used for polyglot in the US Government, but in fact it meant “speaker of a second language” long before it meant “studyer of Language”. So the confusion is understandable, and even deserved. Perhaps philologist should have been retained (adopted?) in English to avoid this confusion – which is much wider spread than mere job titles. How often does “how many languages do you speak?” come as the first response to “I’m a linguist”?
March 21, 2013 at 2:54 am |
Boy, I should have proofread that – too many “in fact”s. Also, meant to say I am a linguist (sense 1) by profession and also (sense 2) by avocation.