AN ENGLISH MEZZOFANTI.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 83, 9 April 1910, Page 10

AN ENGLISH MEZZOFANTI.

English scholarship (writes the West- I minster Gazette) has lost a distinguished comparative -philologist in Mr. James Platt, junr., who died suddenly at Felixstowe on the sth February at the early age of forty-nine. Air. Platt. who was the son of Mr. James Platt, of St. Martins-lane and Cranbourn-street, London, displayed from an earjy age a wonderful power in the acquisition of languages, and at the time of his death is said to have had a. knowledge of the structure and vocabulary of ev«ry known language from Irmerian and Accadian to Romany and Yiddish. In recent years ho devoted his studies specially to what may be called the Barbarian element in tnglish, the names of beasts, birds, fishes, trees, plants, commercial products, terms of anthropology, native customs, and folklore, which generally retain in English sheir native names ; and it was expected by his friends that he would embody his researches in an etymological and historical vocabulary of these words. .Meanwhile Mr. Platt was not niggardly of his knowledge. He was a regular contributor to Notes and Queries, and sometimes wrote in the Athenaeum on his investigations ; and he freely communicated to Sir James Murray and his collaborators on the Oxford English Dictionary all he knew, which was often all that was knowable, about such fresh words as they considered to come within the purview of the dictionary. His services have been recorded in the? prefatory notices, and his loss will be deeply felt by the editors ; for thnie is probably no other man in the English-speaking "world who is able at once to focnte and toll Die history and original meaning cf words from the aboriginal languages of America, Africa, India, Australasia, and Polynesia.

Word has reached Berlin that Prince Tsai Tao, youngest brother of the Regent of China, will shortly arrive in Germany for a thorough course of study of aerial navigation, writes a Berlin correspondent.