polyglottism

[David Kaufman]

Thanks John for this info.  I just communicated with Dick to get the email address of a Mezzofante descendant who wrote to the Linguist List.  (For those of you who don't know, Mezzofante was a cardinal who holds the current polyglot record of speaking about 70 languages (from the 1800s).  Apparently, several of his heirs (including the writer) have also been polyglots leading to a hypothesis about a "polyglot gene".  Interestingly, Cardinale Mezzofante had apparently learned to speak a few Native American languages just by meeting some young members of the tribes, and then held classes to teach them about the grammars of their own languages!

Dave

John Kyle <jkyle at ku.edu> wrote:
Some of you may have seen this on the Linguist List. It seems appropriate
to the weekends discussions on polyglottism:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2923.html

John Kyle
jkyle at ku.edu


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