Faculty Not Easily Acquired.
The faculty of learning languages, he said, was not easily acquired. It took him longer to gain a reading knowledge of French, despite the fact that French and Italian have an enormous number of words derived from the same common source, than it took him to learn Russian and Hebrew—the fifth and sixth languages he began to study—although both the latter are much more difficult than French.
"I had taught myself how to study," he said, "how to systematize, and make everything I had previously learned help me in everything I undertook. I know from my own case that any one can learn a language if he is determined and will give a little time each day to it."
So, by pursuing the method he had learned, Trombetti had placed himself, as far as the number of languages understood is concerned, with Cardinal Mezzofanti, who spoke fifty-eight.
The winning of the king's prize when Trombetti was thirty-seven years old, and after he had struggled amid the direst privations, changed the whole current of his life. He was appointed a professor at the University of Bologna. Linguists everywhere placed their collections at his service, for they recognized that the work he had already done would facilitate the researches and studies of all future inquirers. The scholars of the United States were especially prompt, and the Bureau of Ethnology, when he announced his intention of making a comparative study of Indian languages, sent him a large and valuable collection of works on the subject.