MASTERS OF TONGUES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13086, 27 January 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

MASTERS OF TONGUES.

Twenty-eight are the attempts, Mr. Oscar Browning tells us, which he has made upon different languages. Granted as many masteries, he should not have difficulty in many parts of the world in making himself understood. To the average Englishman the acquisition of tongues is a difficult matter, and his pronunciation of those most necessary is generally vile. It is one of the penalties of being an islander. On the Continent a man must learn two or three languages, and he does. An ordinary day scholar speaks very passable French, tierman, and English. Still, tongue-tied as the average Briton may be, if was one of his countrymen who might well have claimed to be almost the foremost linguist known to the world. This was Sir .John Bowling, author of the Arrow war, who gave us the florin, as tin- first step towards decimal coinage; the man. over whom Palmerston's Government fell, then, returned to triumph on the stiongth of the vote of censure passed upon him. He picked up languages with the case which characterises the panot's acquisition of swearing. Authorities admit that be was really master of forty. He himself declared that he knew two hundred, and could speak halt of them. This enables him to rank with, if even not to excel, Von Gubelentz and Mezzofanti. Gabelentz is said to have learned eighty languages, and to have spoken with fluency at least thirty. Mezzofanti spoke with eloquence, and. in some cases, even with attention to dialectic peculiarities, some fifty or sixty languages of the most widely separated families. On the whole, however, it is not perhaps too much to award the palm to Bowring. His talent was the more conspicuous from the fact that he learned languages during a life of unending activities political and literary. Mezzofauti was merely wonderful in that he could and did learn 'languages; he left nothing behind him but a name. Gabelentz was a statesman as well as a scholar.