ATTAINMENTS OF LINGUISTS.
Taking the very highest estimate which has been offered of their attainments, the list of those who have been reputed to have possessed more than ten languages is a very short one. Only four, in addition to a case that will be presently mentioned,—Mithridates, Pico of Mirandola, Jonadab Almanor, and Sir William Jones,—are said in the loosest sense to have passed the limit of twenty. To the first two fame ascribes twenty-two, to the last two twenty-eight, languages. Müller, Niebuhr, Fulgence, Fresnel, and perhaps Sir John Bowring, are usually set down as knowing twenty languages. For Elihu Burritt and Csoma de Koros their admirers claim eighteen. Renaudot the controversialist is said to have known seventeen; Professor Lee, sixteen; and the attainments of the older linguists, as Arius Montanus, Martin del Rio, the converted Rabbi Libettas Cominetus, and the Admirable Crichton, are said to have ranged from this down to ten or twelve,—most of them the ordinary languages of learned and polite society.
The extraordinary case above alluded to is that of the Cardinal Mezzofanti, the son of a carpenter of Bologna, whose knowledge of languages seems almost miraculous. Von Zach, who made an occasional visit to Bologna in 1820, was accosted by the learned priest, as he then was, in Hungarian, then in good Saxon, and afterwards in the Austrian and Swabian dialects. With other members of the scientific corps the priest conversed in English, Russian, Polish, French, and Hungarian. Von Zach mentions that his German was so natural that a cultivated Hanoverian lady in the company expressed her surprise that a German should be a professor and librarian in an Italian university.
Professor Jacobs, of Gotha, was struck not only with the number of languages acquired by the “interpreter for Babel,” but at the facility with which he passed from one to the other, however opposite or cognate their structure.
Dr. Tholuck heard him converse in German, Arabic, Spanish, Flemish, English, and Swedish, received from him an original distich in Persian, and found him studying Cornish. He heard him say that he had studied to some extent the Quichus, or old Peruvian, and that he was employed upon the Bimbarra. Dr. Wiseman met him on his way to receive lessons in California Indian from natives of that country. He heard “Nigger Dutch” from a Curaçoa mulatto, and in less than two weeks wrote a short piece of poetry for the mulatto to recite in his rude tongue. He knew something of Chippewa and Delaware, and learned the language of the Algonquin Indians. A Ceylon student remembers many of the strangers with whom Mezzofanti was in the habit of conversing in the Propaganda,—those whose vernaculars were Peguan, Abyssinian, Amharic, Syriac, Arabico, Maltese, Tamulic, Bulgarian, Albanian, besides others already named. His facility in accommodating himself to each new colloquist justifies the expression applied to him, as the “chamelion of languages.”
Dr. Russell, Mezzofanti’s biographer, adopting as his definition of a thorough knowledge of language an ability to read it fluently and with ease, to write it correctly, and to speak it idiomatically, sums up the following estimate of the Cardinal’s acquisitions:—
1. Languages frequently tested and spoken by the Cardinal with rare excellence,—thirty.
2. Stated to have been spoken fluently, but hardly sufficiently tested,—nine.
3. Spoken rarely and less perfectly,—eleven.
4. Spoken imperfectly; a few sentences and conversational forms,—eight.