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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Byron died (19-4-1824)
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2024 13:43:27 +0100
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 Ar an fichiú lá de mí Aibreán, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > On 20/04/2024 7:47 p.m., Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 > >
 > >   Ar an fichiú lá de mí Aibreán, scríobh Ross Clark:
 > >
 > >   > [...] The other Byron quote (too long to copy) is about meeting the
 > >   > celebrated "hyperpolyglot", Cardinal Mezzofanti.
 > >   >
 > >   > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Caspar_Mezzofanti
 > >
 > > Now that’s a Wikipedia article full of suspicion!
 > 
 > I thought it was quite an interesting account of the continuing skepticism
 > about exactly how many languages he knew, and about the essential difficulty
 > of putting numbers to such things.

There is one hyperpolyglot of my acquaintance who could manage a conversation
of some sort in about thirty languages. Of course, this is post-internet, where
it’s easier to get practice in, but also he’s not a cardinal of the Catholic
church of that time period, with the opportunity and resources of that context.

The man is long dead, it’s going to be impossible to be certain of his command
of the more obscure languages, for me the appropriate approach of the Wikipedia
article would be to describe his contemporaneous reputation and reknown and
what evidence there is for that.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)