The most multi-lingual student in Britain

Here's an article about Britain's most multi-lingual student, who at the age of 20 is fluent in 11 languages.

Alex, who was brought up in London and went to Latymer School – one of the country's leading fee-paying schools – reckons he had a head-start. "My mother is half Greek and she spoke to me in Greek and a little bit in French when I was young," he says. "My dad had a job in Japan at a university for four years and we went out to visit him."...

For the record, the 11 languages he speaks fluently are English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian. He took A-levels in German, Spanish and Ancient Greek – and also studied French and Latin at GCSE level.

 That's an impressive list, although it should be noted that four of the languages in which he's fluent are really just modern Latin, which he studied to the GCSE (roughly the equivalent of the old year 10 School Certificate in Australia).

And in related news, this article explains why bilinguals are smarter.

Alan Treloar

I've developed the odd habit over the last couple of years, perhaps related to my interest in dead languages, of reading the obituaries in the paper from time. Not in an obsessive way, but I'll often flip to the back of the Herald and have a glance to see who's featured, and more often than not it's someone who I've never heard of, but who lived a remarkably interesting life.

Like Alan Treloar, whose obituary included the following:

Colonel Alan Treloar was one of Australia's greatest linguists and classical scholars and also a distinguished soldier.


Few could rival his knowledge as a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin. He had a special interest in the Roman poet Horace but had read the entire classical literatures of both languages at least twice.


He had an astonishing gift for languages and would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite. In his early 80s he was investigating Bunuba, a language of the Kimberley.

Being (at a stretch) tri-lingual I often meet people who express amazement at my language skills, but in reality I am a mere dwarf compared to such a giant. I am especially in awe of his claim to have read the entire classical literatures of both Latin and Greek twice, to the extent that I wonder if it could possibly be true. I'm sure it is, though how he managed to find the time is completely beyond me.

• Related Post: Jame Murray

multilingualism

When I tell people that I studied Latin and German (and a bit of Classical Greek) at uni they often think it must be a really difficult and confusing thing to learn more than one language at the same time. I think that attitude comes partly from the fact that not many people (especially native speakers of English) bother to learn languages any more, and so to them it seems like a difficult thing. Not so long ago languages were at the core of a liberal education, and to speak several languages was not so unusual.

In Europe it’s still fairly common to speak more than one language; I spent six months on exchange in Vienna during uni and made friends with Bulgarians fluent in German, Russian and English, as well as people from Hungary, China, Spain, Turkey and Poland also fluent in at least German and English, and often other languages besides. One of my good friends there grew up in the French speaking part of Switzerland, with an Italian dad and an Austrian mum, had studied Russian at school, lived in Greece for a year, and picked up English in her spare time by talking to American exchange students. She was pretty fluent (as far as I could tell) in all of them.

James Murray, the most important editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, had an even more remarkable ability with languages. Applying for a job at the British Museum in 1867, Murray wrote the following:

I have to state that philology, both Comparative and Special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes- not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French and occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.

At the time Murray was thirty and working as a bank clerk, having left school at the age of fourteen. He didn’t get the job.

[cited in The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester, p 34]