I’ve never heard of “hyper”-polyglots. Wondering now about hyperpolymaths and hyperpolyhistors. [hat tip to dangerousmeta]

A Teenage Master of Languages Finds Online Fellowship – NYTimes.com

By JOHN LELAND

Published: March 9, 2012

[A] small but vibrant subculture of language geeks, one made possible only by the Internet.

The linguist Michael Erard, in a recent book called “Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners,” describes these autodidacts as a “neural tribe,” joined not by common language but by a restless linguistic promiscuity. As English dominance has made it possible to navigate more and more of the world with just one language, these hyperpolyglots are no longer isolated in their passion for learning dozens or more. …

Do you know what ergativity is?” he asked her, referring to a property of some languages, including Hindi, by which a verb’s subject changes case when the verb is intransitive. [mjh: damn!] …

One day, discussing Turkish, he asked a visitor if he knew what an agglutinative language was. (It is a language in which new words are created by adding prefixes and suffixes.)  …

Hyperpolyglots have been the objects of curiosity at least since the 19th century, when Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti of Bologna was said to have mastered more than 50 languages. For nearly as long, people have debated whether their ability was innate or learned.

A Teenage Master of Languages Finds Online Fellowship – NYTimes.com