Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 January 1907 — A Bluster of Languages. [ARTICLE]

A Bluster of Languages.

Fifty-eight languages at the end of one’s tongue! Yet this was the number of tongues of which the Cardinal Mezzofanti was master, and the most wonderful thing about it was that nearly all of these different languages had several separate dialects. Mezzofanti was probably the greatest linguist the world has ever known. To hear a language was with him to speak it. He was a man with three sepj-g words for every* 1 Tiled! and he laid bis great attainments to his excellent memory and to the fact that once hearing a word he never forgot it. Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of i‘Quo Vadis,” was credited with speaking sixty languages and dialects. There are few men nowadays who pass the mark of speaking knowledge of ten languages. Six or eight seem to be the limit, even with men of great learning. Mithridates, Pico and Sir William Jones were said to he masters of over twenty tongues, and Sir John Bowring, Muller, and Fresnel are said to have spoken in twenty.