Scientists confirm: Willy Melnikov is indeed a polyglot worthy of the Guinness Book of Records
He met me at home in a dressing gown with his own hand painted in various rare dialects.
- This is a sample of my literary work - linguistic belts, - explained Melnikov, turning around himself so that I could get a good look at the Chinese characters on the back, Arabic script on the collar, Farsi on the sleeves. “Visual poetry,” he continued. “For me, words flutter like tapestry fabric. Now I am simply dressed in my poem, composed of multilingual fragments.
And immediately he read me poems in outlandish dialects: piran-dzopa, agua, rdeogg-semfang and chibcha-artambo. Then Willie smoothly switched to Russian: "Tyrannosaurs are childless. / Enter the territory - on the key! / Everlasting, peering and prickly / I will appear in the midst of the rumble of Judgment gossip." This is his pretentious literary style of neologisms, word-images-centaurs, which he called muftolingua.
“Two different words are connected by one“stressed”word and, what is much more important, by one generalized meaning,” explains the polyglot. - A good example of a muftolingua is the saying "Debt by payment is red" sounds like this: "Debt is red by payback."
Here is a romantic muftolingua: "Not every newborn girl grows up to be a little girl, becomes dizzy, lives to the point of fading and acquires the wisdom of a smile."
Willie calls himself a "gatherer of tongues." Today, his “collection” includes traditional European and Eastern languages, rare and exotic dialects spoken by the tribes of Indians and Eskimos, as well as languages that have no speakers on the globe, such as Old Icelandic.
- The funny word "polyglot" I have always associated with "glutton", - admits Willie. - However, in many ways this is either linguistic gluttony, or linguistic drug addiction. The more languages you master, the further you want to explore those still unknown to you. The effect of an unreachable horizon line is triggered.
And Willie is ready for new steps beyond the horizon. After all, there is something to strive for: according to experts, there are about six thousand languages and dialects on Earth. Among them there are isolated languages, that is, they do not have any kindred. Willie calls them "isolates" and loves them the most.
“These are, for example, the languages of the Japanese Ainu, Burmese Gerulau, Vietnamese rukkyums, Catalan Basques, British Picts, Caribbean Guanches,” Melnikov enumerates, savoring. - Therefore, I, knowing only 104 languages, including a handful of the ancients, regret only the brevity of life.
FOREIGN WORLD IS SOLARIS LEMA
In 1999, when Komsomolskaya Pravda first wrote about the 37-year-old unique Willie Melnikov, he read phrases to us in 93 languages. Today, 11 years later, the "collection" has been replenished by another eleven - by language per year! Fiction. Especially for most of us, who studied one foreign language for several years at school, and then another at the institute, and as a result, in the column “knowledge of foreign languages” when applying for a job they modestly write: “With a dictionary”. But why does someone in their entire life fail to speak one foreign language, and some, like Willie, spit on several? What's the secret? Have the experts figured it out over the years?
“We tried to study,” the polyglot admits. - Neurophysiologists, psychologists, linguists, and psychotherapists. But everyone shrugged. By itself, polyglotism is so dumbfounded by people, often causing a far from benevolent reaction that not everyone wants to thoroughly understand the mechanism of the phenomenon itself - either a gift or a curse that I became a hostage to.
- Scientists, - continues Willie, - they explained to me, and I myself am a doctor, a biologist: in order to explain my phenomenon, you need to look for something that can be dissected with a scalpel and chopped on a tomograph. It has something to do with structures that cannot yet be learned with modern tools. Maybe some other field form of life works in the brain of polyglots - like electromagnetic fields that cannot be felt and seen. Some unknown processes of neurochemistry. By the way, I don't think my memory is phenomenal at all. I don't remember well the middle names of people and anecdotes.
However, the researchers found out exactly what served as a springboard for Willie in lingualomania.
- There were three such jumps in my life, - says Willie. - At the age of 4, I began to collect butterflies, insects and memorize their Latin names. At the age of 13, my parents revealed a family secret to me. It turned out that my real name is Storkvist. My grandfather was Swedish, my grandmother was Icelandic. As a veterinarian, he was invited to revolutionary Russia through the Comintern, but ended up in the millstones of the Stalinist meat grinder. The father changed his last name to Melnikov to save the family. And the name according to the passport - Vitaly - I changed myself to Willie.
Having entered the Moscow Veterinary Academy, Willie began to "swing" languages from foreign students - Swahili, Mande, Zulushu, Ewe, Yoruba, Mwanga. I already knew a dozen languages well for the army. A colleague reported to the special department of the unit (the part was secret - missile) that Willie was a polyglot. Special officers interrogated him with partiality and recorded in his personal file that he was a "spy". The tribunal and penal battalion was replaced by Afghanistan.
- And on November 22, 1985, the third springboard happened, - Willie recalls with pain. - During the mortar shelling, an adobe wall broke and fell on our platoon, covered with a blast wave. I survived alone. He remained unconscious for 20 minutes, clinical death lasted 9 minutes. The record is 15 minutes, after which the neurons already die.
For almost three years my head ached as if it had been scraped out from the inside. But then learning new languages suddenly went even faster and easier. It happens like this. Willie looks attentively at a person speaking an unfamiliar dialect, listens to his speech, then as if tunes in, trying different registers, and suddenly, like a receiver, “catches the wave” and gives out clear speech without interference. Or he just starts to feel it. He picks up a book in an unfamiliar dialect and immediately begins to read. Comprehends the language, so to speak, visually. As he reads, a melody begins to sound in his head. This means that the brain is already ready to work on the language. Later taken for grammar.
VICTIM OF CHENNELING
- There is also such an unexplored phenomenon, - Willie continues, - uninterrupted understanding of a text unfamiliar to you. I had a predecessor, John Evans, a fellow of the Royal Archaeological Society in London, who lived in the late 19th century. He was not a polyglot: he knew, in addition to his native English, only Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic and French. At that time, they only began to find Sumerian tablets and take them to Britain. Evans cataloged the findings. Once he peered into one of the Sumerian tablets, cuneiform, and caught himself that the meaning of what was written reached him. He wrote down the translation in a notebook. And there was still more than half a century before the deciphering of the Sumerian writing.
Evans died shortly before the First World War, and already in the 1960s, when many of the ancient texts were read, his notebook was found - and everyone was in shock! The hit was 80 percent. Today I am in his situation: I just look at a language I don't know and understand what it is about. Channeling. This is how American psychoneurologists, whom I met in Prague at a conference on biometrics, tried to explain my phenomenon.
Сhanneling - from the English word сhannel, that is, "channel" and is translated literally as "channeling" or "channel transmission". In other words, Willie for them was a person who was able to receive information from "higher realities." For foreign experts, this term is common; here it refers to esotericism.
- But languages for me, their number, is not an end in itself, - says Willie. - They are doors to other worlds, building material for creating your own art space, and sometimes - and keys to the mysteries of history.
One of Willie's linguistic belts.
THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE FESTIC DISC
Saying these words, Willie touches his talisman around his neck - a stone inscribed with incomprehensible letters on a chain.
“A gift from a shaman,” he caught my eye. - The stone was found during excavations of a Neolithic site. They showed it to a local shaman. When I read this inscription in the language of his ancestors - the Teleuts: “nesaringa itza yoserektkrekushrek” - “before you scratch the sky, check how much the earth has scraped you from itself”, he gave me this amulet.
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And one day Willie undertook to decipher the Phaistos disc. (This is an ancient artifact, which is a disc with unknown inscriptions that cannot be deciphered. - S. K.)
“I don’t insist on my version,” he immediately warned, “but I roughly understood what it was about. The disc contains a shamanic spell for communicating with spirits.
He is also interested in nationalities, the secret of the appearance of which is still unknown. For example, the origin of the African Dogon tribe living in the territory of the modern Republic of Mali. Their ancestors, as legend says, came from the stars, and their descendants still worship Sirius. He specially studied the language of their priests - htachingu. I talked with their children who studied in Moscow. They do not even doubt that they are the children of space aliens.
And in the Elephant Mountains of the Indian state of Kerala, half a thousand Cholanayken live. According to their mythology, their ancestors also "came from the Five White Stars, which devoured each other." Legends of Prehistoric Star Wars? May be.
- Probably, I will upset you, - says Melnikov. - But I did not hear anything extraterrestrial in the Dogon language. And I haven't talked to the inhabitants of the Elephant Mountains yet.
Today Melnikov-Storkvist is a researcher at the Institute of Virology. D. I. Ivanovsky RAMS. Candidate of Medical Sciences. In the famous books of records - Russia and Guinness - his name is not. In order to get on their pages, you need to submit an official statement about your desire to recognize the record. Willie has no such desire.
- Syndrome of socialist competition is not peculiar to me, - he explained.
OPINIONS …
… LINGUIST
Doctor of Philology, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor of the State Linguistic University Dina NIKULICHEVA:
- We studied Willie's abilities. He is definitely a genius person. I don't know if there are still people in the world who know 104 languages like him. Simple polyglots are enough. For example, our deputy director of the institute knows about fifteen languages. Associate Professor of St. Petersburg University Sergei Khalipov - 44. From history - Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy, knew, according to some information, 16 languages, according to others - twice as many. But their abilities lend themselves to modeling. Willie is also unique in that he subordinates polyglossia to his creative tasks. That is, he does not learn languages so as to conduct tourist excursions, but creates in them, plays with them.
He was a standard polyglot before his injury. And after a head injury, his brain got some mysterious access to the world's "linguistic channels." But the way there was open to him because he had a passion for polyglotism in childhood. If in his place there was a guy of his age, but who does not have the same basic language background as Willie's, the gift of languages would not come to him.
Thanks to Willie, by the way, we found common ground in the fate of polyglots. First, their love for languages is born in childhood. Secondly, they usually grow up in a multilingual family or environment. That is, from an early age for them the world sounds in different languages. And the main thing is the goal that they set for themselves. For Heinrich Schliemann, becoming a polyglot was necessary first to survive in an unfamiliar country, and then - in order to get rich. And for Melnikov - creative self-realization.
… BIOLOGY
Director of the Institute of the Human Brain (St. Petersburg), Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Biological Sciences Svyatoslav MEDVEDEV:
- There is a statement by foreign colleagues that polyglots differ from ordinary people in that there is a greater volume of white matter in their brain in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere, in the so-called Geschl gyrus, where sound is processed. But I think this statement is largely controversial. A significant amount of white matter indicates only the presence of large connections between neurons. But the fact is that the volume of a certain area of the brain does not always have a connection with a certain function. Language learning is a complex process that involves many parts of the cerebral cortex and subcortical structures. It is quite possible that the gyrus that attracted the attention of scientists is only the “terminal” area of the process, which reflects the result. Just as we see the result of a computer's work on a monitor, but the whole system unit is working. And how the whole “block” works, we have yet to learn.
… OTHERS
Seva NOVGORODTSEV, a well-known radio host of the BBC Russian Service (Melnikov went to see him for a broadcast in London):
- Willie certainly speaks languages. But there are many such people. Willie is interesting to me because he writes poetry in different languages and draws interesting graphic "linguistic whitewashed".
Alexey SVISTUNOV, Editor-in-Chief of the Russian Book of Records:
- Willy Melnikov-Storkvist has been known to us for a long time. He never officially submitted an application to the Book of Records, therefore, he is listed in the category of facts that have not been fully verified. The editors are ready to consider the application if it is submitted.