The news arrived as an unexpected email. "Sir," it began. "First, let me apologise for bothering you, but I saw an article you wrote and had to write." The writer, N, went on to describe how his grandfather, a Sicilian who had never gone to school, could learn languages with such remarkable ease that by the end of his life he could speak 70 of them, and read and write in 56. (To preserve the writer's anonymity and that of his family, N is not his real initial.) The recipient of the email, which arrived in October 2003, was Dick Hudson, a professor emeritus of linguistics at University College London. N had belatedly come across a 1996 posting by Hudson to Linguist, a popular listserve for language scientists, in which Hudson had casually asked who held the world record for the number of languages they were able to speak. A flurry of postings listed the names of well-known polyglots, such as Giuseppe Mezzofanti, an 18th-century Italian cardinal, or Vernon Walters, a US intelligence officer who died in 2002.
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