language masters (NY Times)

[Greg Thomson, University of Alberta]

>The champion is Francis Sommer, fluent in 94 languages.
>Sommer, who died in 1978, grew up in Speyer, Germany, amusing
>himself by inventing languages. While still a schoolboy, he learned
>Swedish, Sanskrit and Persian. On a visit to Russia, he picked up all
>the major European languages. By the late 1920s, after emigrating to
>the United States, where he found work as a research librarian at the
>Cleveland Public Library, he knew nearly eight dozen languages.

So then, he learned his 93 languages by the age of 40? O.K. Assuming he
started at age zero, and managed to be lingual in each language with a
modest 10,000 item vocabulary, then in 40 years, he acquired 930,000
non-native lexical items, or about 64 per day. Etc. etc. I wonder how he
kept his 94 mental lexicons active enough so that they could function well
in comprehension and production as he continued knowing all those languages
for the next fifty years. (-;

Greg Thomson

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Were the whole realm of nature mine,
that were a present far too small.
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Greg Thomson, c/o Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Alberta,
4-32 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E7, CANADA
Phone: 7-812-246-35-48
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