Barns struck, 179; other buildings, 66.
LIVING LANGUAGES ARE STILL A BABEL.
MODERN CONFUSION OF TONGUES.
Linguists Attempt an Impossible Task if
They Try to Master the Hundreds of
Languages Still Spoken.
Language is, of course, a wonderful telegraph system between minds; but what a multiplicity of codes! The living languages to-day number eight hundred and sixty, to say nothing of five thousand dialects. This is a Babel indeed.
Europe has eighty-nine languages; Asia, one hundred and twenty-three; Africa, one hundred and fourteen; America, one hundred and seventeen; and the islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans have four hundred and seventeen.
Probably the most remarkable linguist the world has ever known was Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, who was born at Bologna in 1774, created cardinal in 1838, and died at Rome in 1849. The list of languages and dialects which he acquired reached the astounding total of one hundred and fourteen.
It would be interesting to know what system was pursued by Cardinal Mezzofanti in the study of languages, but little light is now obtainable on this subject.
The most famous linguists of antiquity were Mithridates, King of Pontus, who is said to have been thoroughly conversant with the languages of the twenty-five nations over which his rule extended; and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, of whom Plutarch says that "she spoke most languages," and that "there were but few of the foreign ambassadors to whom she gave audience through an interpreter."