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Wednesday, February 16, 2022

When People Speak in Languages They Never Learned

In the recent scientific paper "Lost in Another Language: A Case Report," we read a remarkable account of a 17-year-old Dutch boy who woke up from an operation speaking and understanding only English, a language he had used only in school.  The syndrome persisted for about 24 hours, and then faded away, with the boy returning to his language habits of understanding Dutch and using Dutch. It seems this was an example of a rare syndrome called foreign language syndrome in which similar events happen.  As remarkable as such a case is, it seems that even more remarkable language anomaly cases have been recorded: those in which a person seemed to use a language he had never learned.

In Volume 2 of the 1855 work Spiritualism by Judge John W. Edmonds (who served as Chief Justice of the New York State Supreme Court), we have a remarkable account of a psychic who is not named. Edmonds says he will give "a brief account of one medium whose whole progress I have witnessed with intense interest." 

First we are told the woman developed powers of clairvoyance. We hear a reference to the sea disaster in which more than 300 people on the SS Arctic died in 1854:

"Since then this faculty of knowing things at a distance has greatly improved. She saw the wreck of the Arctic when it was occurring. She saw and detailed with great accuracy, as subsequent accounts showed, the recent collision on the Canada Railroad, and that a few moments after it happened, and while the dead and wounded were being lifted out of the ruins. She has seen and described the state of things at Sebastopol and its vicinity, and she has frequently described scenes and conversations going on at the moment, at the distance of several hundred miles from her ; and all this, not when she was in a trance, but in a state of mental consciousness to all around her."

The account gets even stranger when we are told that the woman could speak in languages she never learned:

"She next became developed to speak different languages. She knows no language but her own, and a little smattering of boarding-school French. Yet she has spoken in nine or ten different tongues, sometimes for an hour at a time, with the ease and fluency of a native. It is not unfrequent that foreigners converse with their spirit-friends through her in their own language. A recent instance occurred where a Greek gentleman had several interviews, and for several hours at a time carried on the conversation on his part in Greek, and received his answers sometimes in that language and sometimes in English ; yet until then she had never heard a word of modern Greek spoken. About the same time her musical powers became developed. She has repeatedly sang in foreign languages, such as Italian, In- dian, German, and Polish."

On the same page we get this remarkable claim:

"Her next advance was to see spirits and spiritual scenes, and now scarcely a day passes that she does not describe the spirits who are present, entire strangers to her, yet very readily recognized and identified by their inquiring friends. This has of late been witnessed by very many persons, and many an, unbeliever in spiritual intercourse has been overwhelmed with the evidence of identity which thus by sight and by communion has been presented."

On this page of a book by another author, we read that this woman was a  daughter of Judge Edmonds, Laura Edmonds:

"Miss  Laura  Edmonds,  a  daughter  of  the  Judge,  also  pursued  her researches  in  the  same  direction,  and  became  developed  as  an  excellent medium  for  trance  speaking,  the  discerning  of  spirits,  the  gift  of  tongues, including  several  dead  and  living  languages  utterly  unknown  to  herself,  the ability  to  travel  clairvoyantly  to  distant  places,  and  communicate  with  absent friends  by  the  mental  telegraph."

A much later case of someone seeming to speak in a language he never learned occurs here. It involves statements of a "drop-in communicator" speaking though the lips of the medium Indridi Indridason. In a seance with Indridason held in Reykjavik, Iceland on November 24, 1905, this seemingly paranormal "drop-in communicator" identified himself as Mr. Jensen, and stated that a fire had started in a factory in Copenhagen, Denmark (more than 1300 miles away) on that evening (November 24, 1905) about midnight, and that the fire was quickly brought under control. It was soon found out that exactly such a thing had happened. A newspaper reported that in Copenhagen on November 24, 1905, a factory fire had started about midnight, and was soon brought under control. There were no telephones in Reykjavik until the next year, and no telegraphs until 1918, so there is no way in which electrical communication could have made such a thing known to Indridasson or anyone else at the seance.  Not many days later the same "drop in communicator" more specifically identified himself as Emil Jensen. 

No one present knew whether such an Emil Jensen had ever lived. But it was found out many years later through the investigation of Erlendur Haraldsson that an Emil Jensen had lived and died in Copenhagen, Denmark, very near to the place where the Copenhagen fire had occurred.  The "Emil Jensen" in the seances identified himself as a manufacturer who was a bachelor, and the actual Emil Jensen was such a person. 

Very remarkably, this "drop-in communicator" at the seance (speaking through the lips of the medium Indridi Indridason) had spoken in Danish, a language which Indridason did not even know. On page 222 of the document we are told that the Icelandic medium Indridason had minimal education and "learned how to write and read but no Danish."  We read this on  page 221:

"At many sittings Jensen was seen by sitters appearing in a 'luminous, beautiful light-pillar', usually very briefly but several times during the same séance and at various locations in the hall. This 'pillar of light' would first appear in the darkness, and after that Jensen would appear in it. The 'pillar of light' was larger than Jensen and emitted light in such a way that Jensen and Indridi could sometimes be seen side by side at the same time (Gissurarson & Haraldsson, 1989, pp.82–85). Both of Indridi’s hands were at the same time being held by a witness to exclude the possibility of fraud."  

Swarnlata Mishra was born in Shahpur, in northern India in 1948. When she was three, her father took on a trip to another city, and Swarnlata made odd statements rather suggesting a previous life in the city. Then two years later she (according to this account) "began performing dances, first for her mother and then for others, while also singing in a foreign language she had never had the opportunity to learn."

Iris Farczády was a young Hungarian medium who in trances might seem to be taken over by the spirit of some deceased person, as sometimes seems to occur during seances.  We read the following:

"In 1933 she was taken over by a spirit who identified herself as a 41-year-old Spanish charwoman named Lucía Altarez de Salvio. Lucía did not leave Iris, as earlier communicators had done. She spoke Spanish, understood no Hungarian, and only gradually learned German, the language spoken by Iris’s family. She said that she had died three months before in Madrid, leaving a husband and numerous children. After the transformation, Iris found a new talent in cooking and enjoyed singing Spanish songs and flamenco dancing....Iris was nearly eighty at the time of the last interviews, but still identified herself as Lucía."

The case is also described here, where it explicitly states that Iris had never learned Spanish, but spoke it well. We are told "Lucía’s mastery of Spanish in the Madrilene dialect was precise." The case resembles the astonishing case of Mary Lurancy Vennum described here. But in that case Mary Lurancy Vennum for only three months claimed to be someone else (Mary Roff, who had died a year after Mary Lurancy Vennum was born).  In the case of Iris Farczády, we have someone who apparently claimed to be a different person (Lucía Altarez de Salvio) for more than sixty years. 

Another similar case is the case of Uttara Huddar, an Indian woman described below by an entry in the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research:

"This is a 1970s Indian case of an educated woman, Uttara Huddar, whose personality and memories abruptly changed at the age of 32 to those of a rural villager, Sharada, who had lived and died a century and a half earlier. The transformation proved temporary, but the Sharada personality continued to appear intermittently throughout Uttara’s life. A striking feature of this case is the linguistic element: as ‘Sharada’, Uttara was unable to speak Marathi, her native language, only Bengali, which she previously knew only a little, but could now speak fluently, and in an archaic dialect."

You can read about this fascinating case here.

The article on xeonglossy at www.encyclopedia.com states the following: 

"According to the book Modern American Spiritualism, by Emma Hardinge Britten (1870), in addition to Laura Edmonds, the gift was demonstrated at an early period by Jenny Keyes, who sang in trance in Italian and Spanish, and by a Mrs. Shepherd, Mrs. Gilbert Sweet, a Miss Inman, a Mrs. Tucker, Susan Hoyt, A. D. Ruggles, and several others whose names she was not permitted to make public. They frequently spoke in Spanish, Danish, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Malay, Chinese, and Indian....In The Two Worlds (March 31, 1933), F. H. Wood wrote of the medium Rosemary and 'Lady Nona,' her ancient Egyptian control: 'The fact is now established beyond disproof that over 140 Egyptian word-phrases which were in common use when the great Temple of Luxor in Egypt was built, have been spoken fluently through an English girl who normally knows nothing about the ancient tongue.' " 

Luxor Temple
Luxor Temple in Egypt

The long book Man and His Relations by Samuel Byron Brittan MD is a little-known gem of psychology and parapsychology. In a chapter that includes some fascinating accounts of people performing extremely complex tasks while sleepwalking, on page 373 we have some fascinating accounts of people who could speak in languages they had never learned (references to "magnetic sleep" referred to hypnotized subjects): 

"Fernel  reports  the  facts  respecting  a boy  who  could  speak Greek  and  Latin  when  in  the  magnetic  sleep.  Lorry  also mentions  the  case  of  a girl  of  ten  years  that  would  make long  speeches  when  her  mother  placed  one  hand  on  her head.  When  the  hand  was  removed  the  flow  of  words  and ideas  was  immediately  interrupted.  Professor  Agardh,  of Lund,  Sweden,  furnishes  another  interesting  example.  He met  with  a magnetic  sleeper  in  the  person  of  a boy  who could  speak  Latin  with  greater  fluency  than  his  native tongue.  He  could  also  converse  in  French.  On  one  occasion, when  a person  educated  in  the  English  language  had expressed  doubts  of  his  ability  to  speak  languages  he  had never  learned,  the  boy  immediately  commenced  a conversation in  English,  and  the  skeptic  was  obliged  to  acknowledge that  he  spoke  the  language  as  freely  and  correctly  as  an  educated Englishman.  At  the  same  time  the  teacher  affirmed that  his  pupil  had  never  learned — by  the  ordinary  process of  scholastic  training — a word  that  he  had  uttered."

In another equally long and equally fascinating book on paranormal phenomena ("Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, Their Observation and Experimentation" by Dr. Paul Joire), we read of a paranormal "twofer": a levitation combined with a speaking in a language unknown to the speaker. In the middle of several pages (pages 451-454) documenting levitations of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino we read this quote from a Dr. Ochorowicz:

"Another  most  surprising  and  very  rare  fact  (also obtained  at  the  Congress  at  Milan)  was  the  complete levitation  of  the  very  person  of  the  medium,  who,  held throughout  by  the  hands  and  feet,  was  raised  from  the ground  and  carried  in  a  cataleptic  condition  along  with her  chair  on  to  the  table. 'I  will  raise  my  medium  in  the  air,'  Eusapia  said  in very  correct  French  (a  language  she  does  not  know  in  her normal  condition),  and  she  was  actually  raised.  Such was  at  least  my  impression  during  several  seconds.  By passing  my  hand  under  her  boots  I  am  able  to  testify  that there  was  a  space  of  from  four  to  five  inches  between  them and  the table. On  another  occasion  the  medium  was  suddenly  raised from  the  floor.     She  was  standing,  and  Mme.  Ochorowicz had  time  to  pass  her  hand  between  Eusapia's  feet  and  the floor."

In his book The Voices (which can be read here) the writer William Usborne Moore (formerly a Vice-Admiral) discusses his experiences with the medium Etta Wriedt.  The excellent scholarly work Psychics, Sensitives and Somnambules by Rodger I. Anderson says this on page 186 about Wriedt:

"Wriedt's voices regularly carried on intelligent conversations in Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Spanish....Wriedt's communicators were often very successful in identifying themselves to the sitters, providing correct names and personal histories, referrring to facts and circumstances that were unknown to the sitter at the time but subsequently verified as correct....Wriedt was investigated scores of times by multiple researchers, all finding in her favor." 

Moore's long 400-page book (published in 1913) gives very many accounts corroborating such claims. He describes seances  occurring mainly in 1912, in a room without any audio equipment, at a time when all voice transmission technology was bulky and primitive. The loudspeaker was not really invented until four years later, judging from this quote:  "When Bell Labs introduced the first electronic vacuum tube amplifier in 1916, the true loudspeaker became possible." (Another source dates 1915 as the date when the first "practical dynamic audio speakers" were invented.)

Postscript: On page 9 of the document here, we have this account of xenoglossy (the reference to a guide seems to refer to a spirit guide):

"ADELA ALBERTELLI, Argentine, of Italian parentage, normally speaks only Spanish, and was educated merely at a primary school. _ Yet, in trance, when she gives also clairvoyance and clairaudience, she speaks and writes in English, German, Italian, French, Dutch and Portuguese. With the help of her guide, she has written in Latin about the life of Jesus. Names and places unknown to her have been correctly spelt, and she uses signs that are not employed in Spanish. There is a poem in English, and a love-letter in German, signed, apparently, by Byron, dated August 25, 1819, headed 'Bologna,' and addressed to Teresa Guiccioli, a 16-year-old girl. Another poem is written in a language which has not vet been identified. Sometimes she uses her own handwriting; but usually, especially when foreign languages are involved, the writing changes. 'Two Worlds,' which reports this case, prints a photograph showing five distinct styles of writing."

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