Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (23 page)

The Gift of Tongues

Languages had always been a source of fascination to me and having now settled into my new home and established the website I could really begin to spend more time working on them. The first language I studied after Lithuanian was Spanish. My interest in it was piqued by a conversation that I had with Neil’s mother, in which she talked of holidays the family had taken in various parts of Spain and mentioned that she had been learning the language over many years. I asked if she had any books that I could borrow and she found an old ‘Teach Yourself’ title for me to take away and read. The following week we visited Neil’s parents again and I returned the book to his mother. When I began conversing with her comfortably in Spanish she couldn’t believe it.

I used a similar method to learn Romanian, which I began after my friend Ian asked me for advice on learning the language to help him communicate with his wife, Ana. I supplemented my reading with an online Romanian language edition of the Saint-Exupéry classic,
Micul Print
(
The Little Prince
).

My latest language-learning project is Welsh, a beautiful and distinctive language that I first heard and saw during a holiday with Neil to the small North Wales town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, in the mountains of Snowdonia. Many of the people in this area speak Welsh as their first language (overall one in five people in Wales speak Welsh) and it was the only language that I heard spoken in many of the places that we visited.

Welsh has a number of features that are unique among all the languages I have studied. Words beginning with certain consonants sometimes change their first letters, depending on how they are used in a sentence. For example, the word
ceg
(‘mouth’) changes to
dy geg
(‘your mouth’),
fy ngheg
(‘my mouth’) and
ei cheg
(‘her mouth’). The word order in Welsh is also unusual, with the verb coming first in a sentence:
Aeth Neil i Aberystwyth
(‘Neil went to Aberystwyth’, literally ‘went Neil to Aberystwyth’). I’ve found the hardest part of learning Welsh is the pronunciation of certain sounds, such as ‘ll’, which is rather like putting your tongue in position to say the letter ‘l’ and then trying to say the letter ‘s’.

An invaluable resource for my Welsh study has been the Welsh language television channel S4C which I’m able to watch through my satellite receiver. Programmes are varied and interesting, from the soap opera
Pobol y Cwm
(
People of the Valley
) to the
newyddion
(news). It has proven an excellent way for me to improve my comprehension and pronunciation skills.

The relationship I have with a language is quite an aesthetic one, with certain words and combinations of words being particularly beautiful and stimulating to me. Sometimes I will read a sentence in a book over and over again, because of the way the words make me feel inside. Nouns are my favourite type of words, because they are the easiest for me to visualise.

When I’m learning a language there are a number of things that I consider essential materials to begin with. The first is a good size dictionary. I also need a variety of texts in the language, such as children’s books, stories and newspaper articles, because I prefer to learn words within whole sentences to help give me a feeling for how the language works. I have an excellent visual memory and when I read a word or phrase or sentence written down, I close my eyes, see it in my head and can remember it perfectly. My memory is much poorer if I can only hear a word or phrase and not see it. Conversing with native speakers helps to improve accent, pronunciation and comprehension. I do not mind making mistakes but try very hard not to repeat them once they have been pointed out to me.

Each language can act as a stepping-stone to another. The more languages a person knows, the easier it becomes to learn a new one. This is because languages are somewhat like people: they belong to ‘families’ of related languages, which share certain similarities. Languages also influence and borrow from each other. Even before I began to study Romanian, I could understand perfectly the sentence:
Unde este un creion galben?
(‘Where is a yellow pencil?’), because of the similarities to Spanish:
dónde está
(‘where is?’), French:
un crayon
(‘a pencil’) and German:
gelb
(‘yellow’).

There are also relationships between words inside each language which are unique to it. I am able to see these connections easily. For example, Icelandic has
borð
(‘table’) and
borða
(‘to eat’), French has
jour
(‘day’) and
journal
(‘newspaper’) and German has
Hand
(‘hand’) and
Handel
(a ‘trade’ or ‘craft’).

Learning compound words can help to enrich vocabulary and provide useful examples of a language’s grammar. The German word for vocabulary, as an example, is
Wortschatz
, combining the words
Wort
(‘word’) and
Schatz
(‘treasure’). In Finnish, compounds can be formed that are equivalent to many separate words in other languages. For example, in the sentence:
Hän oli talossanikin
(‘He was in my house too’) the last word
talossanikin
is composed of four separate parts:
talo
(‘house’) + -ssa (‘in’) + -
ni
(‘my’) and -
kin
(‘too’).

I find some aspects of language much more difficult than others. Abstract words are much harder for me to understand and I have a picture in my head for each that helps me to make sense of the meaning. For example, the word ‘complexity’ makes me think of a braid or plait of hair – the many different strands woven together into a complete whole. When I read or hear that something is complex I imagine it as having lots of different parts that need tying together to arrive at an answer. Similarly, the word ‘triumph’ creates a picture in my mind of a large, golden trophy, such as the ones won in big sporting events. If I hear about a politician’s ‘election triumph’ I imagine the politician holding a trophy over his head, like the winning team captain at an FA cup final. For the word ‘fragile’ I think of glass; I picture a ‘fragile peace’ as a glass dove. The image I see helps me to understand that the peace might be shattered at any moment.

Certain sentence structures can be particularly hard for me to analyse, such as: ‘He is not inexperienced in such things’, where the two negatives (‘not’ and ‘in-’) cancel each other out. It is much better if people just say: ‘He is experienced in such things’. Another example is when a sentence begins: ‘Don’t you …?’ as in, ‘Don’t you think we should go now?’ or ‘Don’t you want ice cream?’. Then I become very confused and my head starts to hurt because the questioner is not being clear whether he means: ‘Do you want an ice cream?’ or ‘Is it correct that you don’t want an ice cream?’ and it’s possible to answer both questions with a ‘yes’, but I don’t like it when the same word can mean two completely different things.

As a child, I found idiomatic language particularly confusing. Describing someone as ‘under the weather’ was very strange to me because, I thought, isn’t everyone under the weather? Another common saying that puzzled me was when my parents might excuse one of my brother’s grumpy behaviour by saying: ‘He must have got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.’ ‘Why didn’t he get out of the right side of the bed?’ I asked.

In recent years, scientists have become more and more interested in studying the kind of synaesthetic experiences in language that I have, in order to find out more about the phenomenon and its origins. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran of California’s Center for Brain Studies in San Diego, has researched synaesthesia for more than a decade and believes there may be a link between the neurological basis for synaesthetic experiences and the linguistic creativity of poets and writers. According to one study, the condition is seven times as common in creative people as in the general population.

In particular, Professor Ramachandran points to the facility with which creative writers think up and use metaphors – a form of language where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated things – and compares this to the linking of seemingly unrelated entities such as colours and words, or shapes and numbers in synaesthesia.

Some scientists believe that high-level concepts (including numbers and language) are anchored in specific regions of the brain and that synaesthesia might be caused by excess communication between these different regions. Such ‘crossed wiring’ could lead to both synaesthesia and to a propensity toward the making of links between seemingly unrelated ideas.

William Shakespeare, for example, was a frequent user of metaphors; many of which are synaesthetic, involving a link to the senses. For example, in
Hamlet
, Shakespeare has the character Francisco say that it is ‘bitter cold’ – combining the sensation of coldness with the taste of bitterness. In another play,
The Tempest
, Shakespeare goes beyond metaphors involving only the senses and links concrete experiences with more abstract ideas. His expression: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters,’ connects the abstract ‘music’ with a creeping action. The reader is able to imagine music – something normally very difficult to create a mental picture of – as a moving animal.

But it isn’t only very creative people who make these connections – everyone does. We all rely on synaesthesia to a greater or lesser degree. In their book
Metaphors We Live By
, language scientist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not arbitrary constructions but follow particular patterns, which in turn structure thought. They give as examples expressions that indicate the links: ‘happy’ = ‘up’ and ‘sad’ = ‘down’:
I’m feeling up, my spirits rose; I’m feeling down, he’s really low
. Or ‘more’ = ‘up’ and ‘less’ = ‘down’:
My income rose last year; the number of errors is very low
. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that many of these patterns emerge from our everyday, physical experiences; for example, the link ‘sad’ = ‘down’ may be related to the way that posture droops when a person is feeling sad. Similarly, the link ‘more’ = ‘up’ may come from the fact that when you add an object or substance to a container or pile, the level goes up.

Other language scientists have noted that some of the structural features of many words not normally associated with any function, such as initial phoneme groups, have a noticeable affect on the reader/listener. For example for ‘sl-’ there is: ‘slack’, ‘slouch’, ‘sludge’, ‘slime’, ‘slosh’, ‘sloppy’, ‘slug’, ‘slut’, ‘slang’, ‘sly’, ‘slow’, ‘sloth’, ‘sleepy’, ‘slipshod’, ‘slovenly’, ‘slum’, ‘slobber’, ‘slur’, ‘slog’ … where all these words have negative connotations and some are particularly pejorative.

The idea that certain types of sounds ‘fit’ particular objects better than others goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks. An obvious illustration of this is onomatopoeia, a type of word that sounds like the thing it is describing (‘fizz’, ‘whack’, ‘bang’ etc.). In a test carried out by researchers in the 1960s, artificial words were constructed using particular letters and combinations of letters thought to link to positive or negative feelings. After hearing the invented words, the subjects were asked to match English words for pleasant or unpleasant emotions with one or other of two invented words. The appropriate matches were made significantly more often than would be expected by chance.

This type of latent language synaesthesia in virtually everyone can also be seen in an experiment originally carried out in the 1920s, which investigated a possible link between visual patterns and the sound-structures of words. The researcher, Wolfgang Köhler, a German-American psychologist, used two arbitrary visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and the other sharp and angular, and invented two words for them: ‘takete’ and ‘maluma’. Subjects were asked to say which of the shapes was the ‘takete’ and which the ‘maluma’. The overwhelming majority assigned ‘maluma’ to the rounded shape and ‘takete’ to the angular one. Recently, Professor Ramachandran’s team has replicated the results of this test using the invented words ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’. 95% of those asked thought the rounded shape was a ‘bouba’ and the pointed shape a ‘kiki’. Ramachandran suggests the reason is that the sharp changes in the visual direction of the lines in the ‘kiki’ figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the word’s sound, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.

Professor Ramachandran believes this synaesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. He also points out that lip and tongue movements may be synaesthetically linked to objects and events they refer to. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synaesthetic small ‘i’ sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: ‘little’, ‘teeny’, ‘petite’, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right then language emerged from the vast array of synaesthetic connections in the human brain.