The Linguist

thelinguist.uberflip.com REVIEWS 24 The Linguist Vol/62 No/2 Livio who travelled to Rome from "the remotest corner of the earth" (present-day Cadiz) just to catch a glimpse of the great historian, and the female librarians who carried their collections on muleback to the remote villages of the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression. The author also provides a personal touch by weaving moments of her own bibliophile life into the larger narrative, such as a comical account of how difficult it is to obtain access to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In conclusion, this is a captivating and highly instructive work, admirably translated from Spanish into English by Charlotte Whittle. Ross Smith MCIL CL and improved cognitive resilience, such as in delaying the onset of dementia by up to six years. Multilingualism is not a rigid construct. The neural level is an array of fast-firing mental operations and intersecting networks in flux: "[a] highly interconnected cognitive architecture". The bilingual's unused language runs in the background, sound down, so to speak. Significantly, the brain's executive functions (planning, focusing, remembering, monitoring, inhibiting…) tend to be better developed in multilinguals. In tests in which a colour word, such as 'green', is printed in both black and green ink, bilinguals are quicker to name the colour than are monolinguals. The former are better at managing the competing visual inputs – colour and script, as well as two languages in parallel. Are we different versions of ourselves when using L1 or L2? Memories of events and associated feelings may be influenced by the language spoken at the time. Eva Hoffman, academic and writer, feels differently about life-defining situations depending on whether she is thinking in Polish or English, even to the extent of saying 'yes' or 'no' when asked the same question. It seems that our mother tongue channels thoughts in a direct, elemental way; and the second language expresses ideas in a neutral, acquired tone. Memory and language develop in parallel. What we remember from birth to the age of three is uneven at best. After that, memories are mainly lodged in and retrieved by the dominant language at the time they were encoded. The author's research into language-dependent memory shows that, when asked, migrants may cite two different 'earliest' memories according to the language that they hear the question in. The Power of Language: Multilingualism, self and society offers an enjoyable and stimulating account of the blessings of bilingualism (and beyond). It is strong on memory, thought, music, creativity and experimentation. Part Two on Society is patchier and preachy. Viorica Marian is a professor at Northwestern University where she teaches and is active in research in communication sciences and psychology. Graham Elliott MCIL Papyrus Irene Vallejo Hodder & Stoughton 2022, 464 pp; ISBN 9781529343960 Hardcover, £25 The Power of Language Viorica Marian Pelican Books 2023, 336 pp; ISBN 9780241626016 Hardback, £22 The creation of alphabetic writing in ancient times, and the development of materials on which to practise this revolutionary skill, hardly seem a topic on which to build a best seller, yet that is exactly what Irene Vallejo has done in Papyrus: The invention of books in the ancient world. Thanks to a potent combination of passion, erudition and narrative skill – she is both a classicist and a novelist – this apparently arcane subject is brought vividly to life in her fascinating book, which ranges from the original earthen tablets of Sumeria to our modern digital equivalents. The story commences in dramatic fashion. We are told of mysterious riders galloping along the roads of ancient Greece, hunters in search of an unusual prey. It turns out that they are emissaries of the king of Egypt, charged with the task of buying books for his palace in Alexandria so he can fulfil his dream of gathering all the books ever written into a single collection. This was the beginning of the Great Library of Alexandria, the centre of learning in the Greco-Roman world (and the cornerstone of the book's opening chapters) which, at its zenith, is thought to have held up to 400,000 papyrus scrolls. We do not linger in the classical period, however, and are soon introduced to Lawrence Durrell and Constantine Cavafy, the chroniclers of modern-day Alexandria. Vallejo provides lively sketches of historical characters, some famous and others less so, to illustrate the way in which books gradually became an essential component of human society. She has a predilection for unsung heroes. These include a first-century admirer of Tito No one, I think, reading this review would disagree with this book's one big idea: bi/multilingualism is a personal and social good. Benefits accrue to cognition, memory and mental health, in addition to communication opportunities within and between nations. What we intuitively know about this is reported more often in scientific findings as being actual fact. Ellen Bialystok and other researchers report links between speaking two or more languages

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