In “Babel No More”, Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages—or claim to. A journalist with some linguistics training, Mr Erard is not a hyperpolyglot himself (he speaks some Spanish and Chinese), but he approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism.

Mezzofanti, for example, was a high-ranking clergyman born in 1774. In most of his interactions, he would have been the one to pick the topic of conversation, and he could rely on the same formulae he had used many times. He lived in an age when “knowing” a language more often meant reading and translating rather than speaking fluently with natives. Nonetheless, Mezzofanti clearly had speaking talent; his English accent was so good as to be almost too correct, an Irish observer noted.

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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died in 2001, was said to have learned 50 languages, including notoriously difficult Finnish while on a flight to Helsinki. Professional linguists still swear by his talent. But he insisted he spoke only three (English, Spanish and Warlpiri—from Australia’s Northern Territory) 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. Ziad Fazah, raised in Lebanon and now living in Brazil, once held the Guinness world record for 58 languages. But when surprised on a Chilean television show by native speakers, he utterly flubbed questions in Finnish, Mandarin, Farsi and Russian (including “What day is it today?” in Russian), a failure that lives in infamy on YouTube. Perhaps he was a fraud; perhaps he simply had a miserable day. Hyperpolyglots must warm up or “prime” their weaker languages, with a few hours’ or days’ practice, to use them comfortably. Switching quickly between more than around six or seven is near-impossible even for the most gifted.

Does that mean they don’t really know them? Is instant availability of native-like competence the only standard for “knowing” a language? How should partly knowing a tongue be tallied? What if you can only read in it? Mr Erard repeatedly peppers his text with such questions, feeling his way through his story as a thoughtful observer, rather than banging about like an academic with a theory to defend or a pitchman with a technique to sell.

Hyperpolyglots are more likely to be introverted than extroverted, 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. Another, Alexander Arguelles, has learned dozens of languages only to read them, saying “It’s rare that you have an interesting conversation in English. Why do I think it would be any better in another language?” Emil Krebs, an early-20th-century German diplomat who was also credited with knowing dozens of languages, was boorish 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.

Different hypotheses may explain part of the language-learner’s gift. Some hyperpolyglots seem near-autistic. In support, Mr Erard points to the theory of Simon Baron-Cohen, of Cambridge University, that autists have an “extreme male brain” that seeks to master systems. Another hypothesis is the “Geschwind-Galaburda” cluster of traits. Supposedly resulting from abnormal antenatal exposure to hormones, this cluster includes maleness, homosexuality, left-handedness, poor visual-spatial skills, immune disorders, and perhaps also language-learning talent. Brain areas are also keyed to certain skills. The left Heschl’s gyrus is bigger than average in professional phoneticians. People who learn new vocabulary quickly show more activity in the hippocampus. Krebs’s brain, preserved in slices at a laboratory in Düsseldorf, shows various unusual features.

The discovery of the FOXP2 brain gene, a mutation of which can cause language loss, was met with considerable excitement when it was announced over a decade ago. But the reality is that many parts of the brain work together to produce speech and no single gene, region of the brain or theory can explain successful language-learning. In the end Mr Erard is happy simply to meet interesting characters, tell fascinating tales and round up the research without trying to judge which is the best work.

At the end of his story, however, he finds a surprise in Mezzofanti’s archive: flashcards. Stacks of them, in Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Algonquin and nine other 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 drudgery to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at, admiration mixed with no small amount of incomprehension.

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, Noam Chomsky, a young linguistics professor, gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

Chomsky discussed his ideas with Connecticut journalist Marion Long after numerous canceled interviews. “It was a very difficult situation,” Long says. “Chomsky’s wife was gravely ill, and he was her caretaker. She died about 10 days before I spoke with him. It was Chomsky’s first day back doing interviews, but he wanted to go through with it.” Later, he gave even more time to DISCOVER reporter Valerie Ross, answering her questions from his storied MIT office right up to the moment he dashed off to catch a plane.

You describe human language as a unique trait. What sets us apart?
Humans are different from other creatures, and every human is basically identical in this respect. If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. This unique human possession, which we hold in common, is at the core of a large part of our culture and our imaginative intellectual life. That’s how we form plans, do creative art, and develop complex societies.

When and how did the power of language arise?
If you look at the archaeological record, a creative explosion shows up in a narrow window, somewhere between 150,000 and roughly 75,000 years ago. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion 
of complex artifacts, symbolic representation, measurement of celestial events, complex social structures–a burst of creative activity that almost every expert on prehistory assumes must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language. And it doesn’t seem to be connected with physical changes; the articulatory and acoustic [speech and hearing] systems of contemporary humans are not very different from those of 600,000 years ago. There was a rapid cognitive change. Nobody knows why.

What first sparked your interest in human language?
I read modern Hebrew literature and other texts with my father from a very young age. It must have been around 1940 when he got his Ph.D. from Dropsie College, a Hebrew college in Philadelphia. He was a Semitist, working on medieval Hebrew grammar. I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that. But back then, studying grammar meant organizing the sounds, looking at the tense, making a catalog of those things, and seeing how they fit together.

Linguists have distinguished between historical grammars and 
descriptive grammars. What is the difference between the two? 
Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks so you have to try to reconstruct it. It is an effort to reconstruct how languages developed through time, analogous to the study of evolution. Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. It is kind of like the difference between evolution and psychology.

And linguists of your father’s era, what did they do?
They were taught field methods. So, suppose you wanted to write a grammar of Cherokee. You would go into the field, and you would elicit information from native speakers, called informants.

What sort of questions would the linguists ask?
Suppose you’re an anthropological linguist from China and you want to study my language. The first thing you would try to do is see what kind of sounds I use, and then you’d ask how those sounds go together. So why can I say “blick” but not “bnick,” for example, and what’s the organization of the sounds? How can they be combined? If you look at the way word structure is organized, is there a past tense on a verb? If there is, does it follow the verb or does it precede the verb, or is it some other kind of thing? And you’d go on asking more and more questions like that.

But you weren’t content with that approach. Why not?
I was at Penn, and my undergraduate thesis topic was the modern grammar of spoken Hebrew, which I knew fairly well. I started doing it the way we were taught. I got a Hebrew-speaking informant, started asking questions and getting the data. At some point, though, it just occurred to me: This is ridiculous! I’m asking these questions, but I already know the answers.

Soon you started developing a different approach to linguistics. How did those ideas emerge?
Back in the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, the general assumption was that language, like all other human activities, is just a collection of learned behaviors developed through the same methods used to train animals—by reinforcement. That was virtually dogma at the time. But there were two or three of us who didn’t believe it, and we started to think about other ways of looking at things.

In particular, we looked at a very elementary fact: Each language provides a means to construct and interpret infinitely many structured expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation and an expression in sound. So there’s got to be what’s called a generative procedure, an ability to generate infinite sentences or expressions and then to connect them to thought systems and to sensory motor systems. One has to begin by focusing on this central property, the unbounded generation of structured expressions and their interpretations. Those ideas crystallized and became part of the so-called biolinguistic framework, which looks at language as an element of human biology, rather like, say, the visual system.

You theorized that all humans have “universal grammar.” What is that?
It refers to the genetic component of the human language faculty. Take your last sentence, for example. It’s not a random sequence of noises. It has a very definite structure, and it has a very specific semantic interpretation; it means something, not something else, and it sounds a particular way, not some other way. Well, how do you do that? There are two possibilities. One, it’s a miracle. Or two, you have some internal system of rules that determines the structures and the interpretations. I don’t think it’s a miracle.

What were the early reactions to your linguistic ideas?
At first, people mostly dismissed or ignored them. It was the period of behavioral science, the study of action and behavior, including behavior control and modification. Behaviorism held that you could basically turn a person into anything, depending on how you organized the environment and the training procedures. The idea that a genetic component entered crucially into this was considered exotic, to put it mildly. 

Later, my heretical idea was given the name “the innateness hypothesis,” and there was a great deal of literature condemning it. You can still read right now, in major journals, that language is just the result of culture and environment and training. It’s a commonsense notion, in a way. We all learn language, so how hard could it be? We see that environmental effects do exist. People growing up in England speak English, not Swahili. And the actual principles—they’re not accessible to consciousness. We can’t look inside ourselves and see the hidden principles that organize our language behavior any more than we can see the principles that allow us to move our bodies. It happens internally.

How do linguists go about searching for these hidden principles?

You can find information about a language by collecting a corpus of data—for instance, the Chinese linguist studying my language could ask me various questions about it and collect the answers. That would be one corpus. Another corpus would just be a tape recording of everything I say for three days. And you can investigate a language by studying what goes on in the brain as people learn or use language. Linguists today should concentrate on discovering the rules and principles that you, for example, are using right now when you interpret and comprehend the sentences I’m producing and when you produce your own.

Isn’t this just like the old system of grammar that you rejected?
No. In the traditional study of grammar, you’re concentrating on the organization of sounds and word formation and maybe a few observations about syntax. In the generative linguistics of the last 50 years, you’re asking, for each language, what is the system of rules and principles that determines an infinite array of structured expressions? Then you assign specific interpretations to them.

Has brain imaging changed the way we understand language?
There was an interesting study of brain activity in language recently conducted by a group in Milan. They gave subjects two types of written materials based on nonsense language. One was a symbolic language modeled on the rules of Italian, though the subjects didn’t know that. The other was devised to violate the rules of universal grammar. To take a particular case, say you wanted to negate a sentence: “John was here, John wasn’t here.” There are particular things that you are allowed to do in languages. You can put the word “not” in certain positions, but you can’t put it in other positions. So one invented language put the negation element in a permissible place, while the other put it in an impermissible place. The Milan group seems to have found that permissible nonsense sentences produced activity in the language areas of the brain, but the impermissible ones—the ones that violated principles of universal grammar—did not. That means the people were just treating the impermissible sentences as a puzzle, not as language. It’s a preliminary result, but it strongly suggests that the linguistic principles discovered by investigating languages have neurocorrelates, as one would expect and hope.

Recent genetic studies also offer some clues about language, right?

In recent years a gene has been discovered called FOXP2. This gene is particularly interesting because mutations on it correspond with some deficiencies in language use. It relates to what’s called orofacial activation, the way you control your mouth and your face and your tongue when you speak. So FOXP2 plausibly has something to do with the use of language. It’s found in many other organisms, not just humans, and functions in many different ways in different species; these genes don’t do one single thing. But that’s an interesting preliminary step toward finding a genetic basis for some aspects of language.

You say that innate language is uniquely human, yet FOXP2 shows a 
continuity among species. Is that a contradiction?
It’s almost meaningless that there’s a continuity. Nobody doubts that the human language faculty is based on genes, neurons, and so on. The mechanisms that are involved in the use, understanding, acquisition, and production of language at some level show up throughout the animal world, and in fact throughout the organic world; you find some of them in bacteria. But that tells you almost nothing about evolution or common origins. The species that are maybe most similar to humans with regard to anything remotely like language production are birds, but that’s not due to common origin. It’s what’s called convergence, a development of somewhat analogous systems independently. FOXP2 is quite interesting, but it’s dealing with fairly peripheral parts of language like [physical] language production. Whatever’s discovered about it is unlikely to have much of an effect on linguistic theory.

Over the past 20 years you’ve been working on a “minimalist” 
understanding of language. What does that entail? 

Suppose language were like a snowflake; it takes the form it does because of natural law, with the condition that it satisfy these external constraints. That approach to the investigation of language came to be called the minimalist program. It has achieved, I think, some fairly significant results in showing that language is indeed a perfect solution for semantic expression—the meaning—but badly designed for articulate expression, the particular sound you make when you say “baseball” and not “tree.” 

What are the outstanding big questions in linguistics? 

There are a great many blanks. Some are “what” questions, like: What is language? What are the rules and principles that enter into what you and I are now doing? Others are “how” questions: How did you and I acquire this capacity? What was it in our genetic 
endowment and experience and in the laws of nature? And then there are the “why” questions, which are much harder: Why are the principles of language this way and not some other way? To what extent is it true that the basic language design yields an optimal solution to the external conditions that language must satisfy? That’s a huge problem. To what extent can we relate what we understand about the nature of language to activity taking place in the brain? And can there be, ultimately, some serious inquiry into the genetic basis for language? In all of these areas there’s been quite a lot of progress, but huge gaps remain.

Every parent has marveled at the way children develop language. It seems incredible that we still know so little about the process.
We now know that an infant, at birth, has some information about its mother’s language; it can distinguish its mother’s language from some other language when both are spoken by a bilingual woman. There are all kinds of things going on in the environment, what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Somehow the infant reflexively selects out of that complex environment the data that are language-related. No other organism can do that; a chimpanzee can’t do that. And then very quickly and reflexively the infant proceeds to gain an internal system, which ultimately yields the capacities that we are now using. What’s going on in the [infant’s] brain? What elements of the human genome are contributing to this process? How did these things evolve?

What about meaning at a higher level? The classic stories that people retell from generation to generation have a number of recurring themes. Could this repetition indicate something about innate human language?
In one of the standard fairy tales, the handsome prince is turned into a frog by the wicked witch, and finally the beautiful princess comes around and kisses the frog, and he’s the prince again. Well, every child knows that the frog is actually the prince, but how do they know it? He’s a frog by every physical characteristic. What makes him the prince? It turns out there is a principle: We identify persons and animals and other living creatures by a property that’s called psychic continuity. We interpret them as having some kind of a mind or a soul or something internal that persists independent of their physical properties. Scientists don’t believe that, but every child does, and every human knows how to interpret the world that way.

You make it sound like the science of linguistics is just getting started.
There are many simple descriptive facts about language that just aren’t understood: how sentences get their meaning, how they get their sound, how other people comprehend them. Why don’t languages use linear order in computation? For example, take a simple sentence like “Can eagles that fly swim?” You understand it; everyone understands it. A child understands that it’s asking whether eagles can swim. It’s not asking whether they can fly. You can say, “Are eagles that fly swimming?” You can’t say, “Are eagles that flying swim?” Meaning, is it the case that eagles that are flying swim? These are rules that everyone knows, knows reflexively. But why? It’s still quite a mystery, and the origins of those principles are basically unknown.

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I’ve posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the “mind” concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. Wierzbicka (2005) delves into this problem in detail. She argues that speakers of a particular language make assumptions about what must be universal based on their own ability to imagine doing without a certain concept. Important cross-cultural differences in meaning become lost in translation. For instance, Piaget’s “The moral judgment of the child” was translated to English by substituting the French “juste” with the English “fair.” So, English readers think they are reading about the development of fairness in children, when this was not the author’s intention. 

Translation is a deep problem, but it is often ignored in psychology. Generalisations about cognition must be made in some language, but, language is specific to particular cultures. Our choice of language, then, inevitably will bias how we talk about cognition across cultures.

“If we uncritically formulate some hypothetical universals in one particular natural language, for example, English, we run the risk of distorting them by imposing on them the perspective embedded in that particular language; and the same applies to our description of cultural differences” (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 257).

“Awhile” is an adverb. It modifies a verb and means “for a short time”: He chatted awhile and then left. “Awhile” should not be used as the object of a preposition, so constructions like “for awhile” or “in awhile” are wrong.

But here’s the tricky part: “while” is a noun meaning “a period of time,” and can be used with a preposition, preceded of course by the article “a”: He chatted for a while and then left. The meaning is the same. 

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
NY Times: October 10, 2011

RANDOLPH, N.J. — As his history class at the County College of Morris here discussed exploration of the New World, Philip Garber Jr. raised his hand, hoping to ask why China’s 15th-century explorers, who traveled as far as Africa, had not also reached North America.

He kept his hand aloft for much of the 75-minute session, but the professor did not call on him. She had already told him not to speak in class.

Philip, a precocious and confident 16-year-old who is taking two college classes this semester, has a lot to say but also a profound stutter that makes talking difficult, and talking quickly impossible. After the first couple of class sessions, in which he participated actively, the professor, an adjunct named Elizabeth Snyder, sent him an e-mail asking that he pose questions before or after class, “so we do not infringe on other students’ time.”

As for questions she asks in class, Ms. Snyder suggested, “I believe it would be better for everyone if you kept a sheet of paper on your desk and wrote down the answers.”

Later, he said, she told him, “Your speaking is disruptive.”

Unbowed, Philip reported the situation to a college dean, who suggested he transfer to another teacher’s class, where he has been asking and answering questions again.

While Philip’s case is unusual, stuttering is not: About 5 percent of people stutter at some point, and about 1 percent stutter as adults, according to the National Institutes of Health.

His classroom experience underlines a perennial complaint among stutterers, that society does not recognize the condition as a disability, and touches on an age-old pedagogical — and social — theme: the balance between the needs of an individual and the good of a group.

“As we do with all students seeking accommodations, we have taken action to resolve Philip’s concerns so he can successfully continue his education,” said Kathleen Brunet Eagan, the college’s communications director.

She would not say if Ms. Snyder, who declined to discuss the matter, had been disciplined, but noted that the college “strives to educate faculty and staff on how to accommodate students.”

Ms. Snyder has taught history at the college for a decade, and several current and former students on campus said in interviews that they had largely positive views of her. She was one of the first students when the college opened in 1968, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Montclair State University, and taught middle school social studies for more than 30 years.

For Philip, who has spent most of his life being home-schooled or attending a small charter school, the teacher’s attitude was a surprise and a disappointment. “I’ve never experienced any kind of discrimination,” he said, “so for it to happen in a college classroom was quite shocking.”

Jim McClure, a board member of the National Stuttering Association and its spokesman, said Philip’s experience is unusual — because most stutterers avoid speaking in class.

“Teachers ignore them, or have to coax them to speak out,” Mr. McClure said. “The fact that this guy wants to participate is a really healthy sign.”

Kasey Errico, who taught most of Philip’s seventh- and eighth-grade classes at the Ridge and Valley Charter School in Blairstown, N.J., noted that there were always students who monopolized class time.

“I wonder what this professor has done with those students, the ones who didn’t stutter,” Ms. Errico said. “If she told them the same thing she told Philip, then I might understand.”

Two students in Ms. Snyder’s class, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating their teacher, said that Philip did take up more time than the other students, but not egregiously so, and that his contributions were solid. They said they did not know what happened between him and Ms. Snyder, but did notice the day he held his hand up for most of the class and never got called on.

“What about a kid who’s got a thick accent and has to repeat everything?” asked Philip’s father, also named Philip, the managing editor of two small newspapers. “I don’t think you’d tell that kid he can’t talk.”

But advocates for people who stutter say that the same people who accept a delay in a bus ride to load a disabled passenger are often less patient with those who struggle to speak clearly.

Doctors once saw stuttering as a psychological issue, but the current medical view is that its origins are physiological and hereditary, though emotions can make it worse. Last year, the National Institutes of Health identified the first genes linked to stuttering.

The outlines of Philip’s experience are common: there was a family history (an uncle who stuttered), the problem began before he reached school age, and he spent years going to speech therapists, some of whom did more harm than good. His most recent therapist gave Philip confidence and some techniques for managing his speech, but he decided last winter to stop going, at least for now.

“I understand that it can be hard to listen to someone who stutters, but the answer can’t just be to shut him down,” said his mother, Marin Martin, a nurse. As it is, she said, “there are social situations where he just can’t be part of the conversation.”

Talking with Philip requires a degree of patience — all the more so because he is remarkably uninhibited, and tends to speak in complete paragraphs, as displayed in videos on his YouTube channel. For the listener, the payoff is insight and wry wit.

He has suppressed a trait common to stutterers — bouncing all or part of the body, as if trying to force a word out. “I found it’s hard to get people to listen when they think you’re having a seizure,” he said. An avid amateur photographer, he hopes to make a career of it, but worries that “even if nobody expects the photographer to say much, you do have to talk.”

After years of speech therapy, Philip can force himself to speak fairly fluidly, but it requires such intense concentration that he cannot hold a train of thought for long while doing it.

For now, he is taking courses in history and English composition at the college, home-schooling in other subjects and traveling into Manhattan once a week to work on acting and playwriting with Our Time Theater Company, a group for people who stutter.

As for Ms. Snyder, he said he might have had some sympathy for the professor’s quandary if she had expressed it less harshly.

“I’ve been very lucky to never have been teased, bullied or anything, but some people who stutter completely stop speaking because of that kind of abuse,” Philip said. “People don’t think of it as a legitimate disability. They just need to learn.”

Taiwanese has extremely extensive tone sandhi (tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. What an ‘utterance’ (or ‘intonational phrase’) is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of this article, an utterance may be considered a word, a phrase, or a short sentence. The following rules, listed in the traditional pedagogical mnemonic order, govern the pronunciation of tone on each of the syllables affected (that is, all but the last in an utterance):

• If the original tone number is 5, pronounce it as tone number 3 (Quanzhou/Taipei speech) or 7 (Zhangzhou/Tainan speech).
• If the original tone number is 7, pronounce it as tone number 3.
• If the original tone number is 3, pronounce it as tone number 2.
• If the original tone number is 2, pronounce it as tone number 1.
• If the original tone number is 1, pronounce it as tone number 7.
• If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 4.
• If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 8.
• If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 3.
• If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 2.

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

“It doesn’t matter what language or style you take,” said systems biologist Marcelo Montemurro of England’s University of Manchester, lead author of a study May 13 in PLoS ONE. “In languages as diverse as Chinese, English and Sumerian, a measure of the linguistic order, in the way words are arranged, is something that seems to be a universal of languages.”

Language carries meaning both in the words we choose, and the order we put them in. Some languages, like Finnish, carry most of their meaning in tags on the words themselves, and are fairly free-form in how words are arranged. Others, like English, are more strict — “John loves Mary” means something different from “Mary loves John.”

Montemurro realized that he could quantify the amount of information encoded in word order by computing a text’s “entropy,” or a measure of how evenly distributed the words are. Drawing on methods from information theory, Montemurro co-author Damián Zanette of the National Atomic Energy Commission in Argentina calculated the entropy of thousands of texts in eight different languages: English, French, German, Finnish, Tagalog, Sumerian, Old Egyptian and Chinese.

Then the researchers randomly rearranged all the words in the texts, which ranged from the complete works of Shakespeare to The Origin of Species to prayers written on Sumerian tablets.

“If we destroy the original text by scrambling all the words, we are preserving the vocabulary,” Montemurro said. “What we are destroying is the linguistic order, the patterns that we use to encode information.”

The researchers found that the original texts spanned a variety of entropy values in different languages, reflecting differences in grammar and structure.

But strangely, the difference in entropy between the original, ordered text and the randomly scrambled text was constant across languages. This difference is a way to measure the amount of information encoded in word order, Montemurro says. The amount of information lost when they scrambled the text was about 3.5 bits per word.

“We found, very interestingly, that for all languages we got almost exactly the same value,” he said. “For some reason these languages evolved to be constrained in this framework, in these patterns of word ordering.”

This consistency could reflect some cognitive constraints that all human brains run up against, or give insight into the evolution of language, Montemurro suggests.

Cognitive scientists are still debating whether languages have universal features. Some pioneering linguists suggested that languages should evolve according to a limited set of rules, which would produce similar features of grammar and structure. But a study published last month that looked at the structure and syntax of thousands of languages found no such rules.

It may be that universal properties of language show up only at a higher level of organization, suggests linguist Kenny Smith of the University of Edinburgh.

“Maybe these broad-brushed features get down to what’s really essential” about language, he said. “Having words, and having rules for how the words are ordered, maybe those are the things that help you do the really basic functions of language. And the places where linguists traditionally look to see universals are not where the fundamentals of language are.”

Today’s baseball rosters are filled with names, not nicknames, not like the ones that used to be. The N.B.A. playoffs are equally devoid of onomastic pleasures, just cheap echoes of Magic and the Mailman, Tiny and Tree, Chief and Cornbread. The N.F.L. cannot match the treasured nicknames that evoke folk heroes like Night Train, Hacksaw and the Refrigerator.

A part of sports, somewhere near the soul, is slowly dying an unimaginative death. In an age of A-Rod and D-Wade, when nicknames rarely conjure imagery beyond a corporate logo, it can be easy to bemoan the loss of another slice of simpler times.

“There’s no substance there,” said the Hall of Fame basketball player Walt Frazier, also known as Clyde.

But sociologists and experts in onomastics, the study of names, said the diminishment of nicknames was not exclusive to famous athletes. Studies on the subject are few, but there is widespread agreement that the use of nicknames across American society has steadily slipped.

“You just have to extrapolate in places where you can gather data, like baseball players,” said Cleveland Evans, an associate professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska, who writes a regular column on names for The Omaha World-Herald. “And they are certainly less common than they used to be.”

Less certain is why. Maybe it reflects a loss of intimacy and connectedness. Maybe it is because of the changing way we name children, or how we now deflect unflattering nicknames to shape our own identities. Maybe all the good nicknames are taken.

Whatever the case, the decline is most easily gauged in sports, where nicknames have long played a role in distinguishing and at times deifying athletes. They often arrived with a nickname given by family or school friends. (Such was the case for Lawrence Peter Berra, called Yogi by a boyhood friend for his apparent similarity to a film version of a Hindu yogi.)

Those who did not have one were frequently nicknamed by their teammates or coaches. (George Herman Ruth did not become Babe until he was signed by the Baltimore Orioles.)

Sportswriters, looking for imagery or lyrical alliteration in the age before cable television, made a habit of bestowing nicknames on athletes. Rams receiver Elroy Hirsch became Crazy Legs because of a Chicago newspaper reporter; decades later, a 15-year-old basketball player named Earvin Johnson was considered Magic by a reporter in Lansing, Mich.

“When we gave them a nickname, good or bad, it meant that we cared,” said Ernest Abel, a Wayne State professor of psychology and obstetrics who has studied names and is on the executive council of the American Name Society. “You don’t give someone about whom you are indifferent a nickname. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

Doc Rivers, the coach of the N.B.A.’s Boston Celtics, was simply Glenn as a boy in Chicago. But he was a big fan of Julius Erving, known as Dr. J, and wore an Erving shirt when he arrived to play at Marquette. Al McGuire, the former Marquette coach, was there and nonchalantly called him Doc.

“I didn’t have a lot of say-so in it,” Rivers said recently.

When Rivers played for the Atlanta Hawks in the mid-1980s, his teammates included Tree Rollins, Spud Webb and Dominique Wilkins, the Human Highlight Film. Now Rivers coaches a perennial championship contender with big-name stars that is nearly devoid of memorable nicknames. Shaquille O’Neal continually nicknames himself — generally a no-no — but people still call him Shaq.

“Back then, I thought you got nicknamed from other people, and it stuck,” Rivers said. “And now it’s almost like guys or gym-shoe companies try to give you a nickname. It’s not as natural.”

One exception is Glen Davis, the soft-muscled Celtics forward. Everyone he knows — friends, coaches, his mother — has called him Big Baby since he was a big baby with a propensity for crying.

Now Davis is part of a dying legacy of great nicknames.

“That’s true,” he said. “Most people don’t even know my name. They just know Big Baby. That’s a good thing.”

There are a smattering of other present-day nicknames around the sports world, including the golfer Tiger Woods, the baseball player David (Big Papi) Ortiz and the basketball player Chris (Birdman) Andersen. The San Francisco Giants, last year’s World Series winners, featured pitcher Tim (the Freak) Lincecum and third baseman Pablo Sandoval, known as Kung Fu Panda.

But most famous athletes are now best known by their given name. The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod — has what passes for a nickname these days.

The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in the 1950s.

Using a baseball encyclopedia listing all major league players from 1871 to 1968, Skipper found that 28.1 percent of players had nicknames not derived from their given names. (Lefty, Red and Doc were most popular.) No doubt the percentage has since dipped precipitously.

“The era of the colorful nickname may be over,” Skipper concluded about 30 years ago.

Chris Berman, and ESPN announcer, saw the void in the 1980s. He became well known for his creation and use of hundreds of colorful nicknames, based mostly on puns — Mike (Pepperoni) Piazza, Sammy (Say it Ain’t) Sosa and Bert (Be Home) Blyleven among them.

“I viewed it as reviving a lost art,” Berman said. “Why aren’t there nicknames now? Maybe everything is so literal. You can see everybody on the Internet, TV, YouTube, whatever it is. There’s very little left to the imagination.”

The Harlem Globetrotters, more than any other team, keep the nickname tradition alive. Every player on the roster has one.

“We want our fans to have an emotional attachment to our players, especially kids,” Kurt Schneider, the Globetrotters’ chief executive, wrote in an e-mail. “It’s more fun and easier to connect with — and emulate — Special K, Dizzy and Ant, than it is Kevin, Derick or Anthony. A nickname grants ethereal status to a player and elevates him to a platform where kids can aspire to be like them; it is a form of escapism and fantasy to want to be like Thunder or Hammer, and they are global in nature.”

In other words, the Globetrotters try to engineer a connection that generally does not exist today. Athletes are more famous and more disconnected from fans than ever, sociologists said.

“I think it represents a loss of intimacy and identification with the players,” said Ed Lawson, past president of the American Name Society. “I don’t know how you have the same level of affection when a guy makes $16 million a year.”

But nicknames rarely came from fans; they came from friends and family, teammates and reporters. None of those connections are as strong as they once were.

“With the communication age, everybody’s on the computer, the cellphones, there’s not a lot of communication,” said Frazier, who became Clyde four decades ago when his wide-brimmed hats reminded Knicks teammates of the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“When we traveled, there were only three channels, and all during the day, there was nothing but soaps on,” Frazier added. “So the guys spent a lot of time together, playing cards, talking, hanging around in the same places, traveling together on the bus or whatever it might be. There was a lot of camaraderie among the players.”

George Gmelch, a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and a former minor league baseball player, said the influx of international athletes could be a factor in the decline of nicknames. American players are less likely to give nicknames to Hispanic or Japanese players, he said.

He and others also suggested that nicknames were less useful, given the trend toward less-common names. After all, the N.B.A. player Joe Bryant was better known as Jellybean. His more famous son is simply Kobe.

According to the Social Security Administration, the 10 most popular baby names for boys in 1956 represented 31.1 percent of the total born. In 1986, around the time many of today’s athletes were born, the top 10 represented only 21.3 percent of the total. In 2010, the number dropped to 8.4 percent.

“Nicknames are less needed today because given names themselves are so much more varied than they used to be,” said Evans, the Bellevue psychology professor.

He also posited that nicknames are often “humorous or noncomplimentary, and we may live in a culture where people are less willing to accept names that are less complimentary.”

It is telling that few of today’s biggest stars have widely used nicknames. LeBron James is an exception, but he is better known as LeBron than as King, the lofty nickname used for commercial purposes. Michael Jordan never really had a nickname, lest those who wanted to “be like Mike” be distracted from buying Air Jordans.

“Their own names now act as brand names,” said Frank Neussel, editor of Names: A Journal of Onomastics, and a University of Louisville professor of modern language and linguistics. “Your identity is not your nickname. It’s your stats.”