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[ghost]

Well folks:

For those of you who have trouble learning Turkish as a foreign language....take heart...a British linguist who died recently spoke 44 languages at a fluent level (advanced). He was George Campbell....Not only did he speak 44 languages fluently, but he also had knowledge of 20 more languages, for a total of approximately 65 languages!

Here are some excerpts from a recent article about him (source: Washington Post).

After retiring, he taught himself classical Chinese, Basque, and tensor calculus.

George Campbell, a British linguist who could converse with cabbies and shopkeepers, write scholarly tomes and conduct learned discourse in more than 40 languages, died of pneumonia Dec. 15 in Brighton, England. He was 92.

Campbell, who was listed in the Guiness Book of World Records during the 1980's as one of the world's greatest living linguists, could speak and write fluently in at least 44 languages and had a working knowledge of perhaps 20 others.

He was the author of the Compendium of the World's Languages (Routlege, 2000), a two-volume work that includes articles on more than 250 tongues, along with a summary of the language's geographic location, its relation to other languages and the number of people who speak it.

Campbell, a linguist at the BBC for many years, also wrote a companion book, "Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" (Routlege, 1997).

George Law Campbell was born in Dingwall, Scotland, the son of the overseer of gardens and dells for Lord and Lady Seaforth, heirs to the Braham castle estates. The Campbell family lived on the main estate, near the castle.

Campbell's sister Aileen Campbell McCausey noted her older brother had a slight stammer from an early age. Playing outside at age 2.5 - 3, he was attacked by the Seaforth family dogs. McCausey said their mother always claimed his stammer originated in that traumatic event.

In school - from elementary through high school, as McCausey recalled - teachers thought Campbell was a dunce because of his stammer. They relegated him to the back of the classroom and ignored him, which allowed him to devour language books on his own.

His sister recalled he told an Oxford University interviewer "if it was today's world, someone would have cured me, and I would never have been a linguist."

Sitting in the back of the classroom, he taught himself Spanish and Italian before learning French and German in high school. When he applied to the University of Edinburgh, he found out he needed to know a classic language, so he taught himself six years of Latin in a year and won the school's Latin prize. He found his language books burrowing through second hand bookstalls at a fish market.

He studied German at the University of Leipzig and mastered eight other languages from fellow students who had come to Leipzig from central and eastern Europe.

In 1937, he received a degree in librarianship from London University and became assistant librarian in the School of Slavonic Studies. He picked up Hungarian, Persian and Albanian along the way.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Campbell was called to the military but ws immediately transferred to the BBC World Service as a language supervisor. His job, as former colleague Victor Price noted in a Scottish newspaper, the "Ross-Shire Journal," was to make sure speakers did not stray from their authorized scripts and to shut them off if they did. He stayed with the BBC until 1974, when he retired as head of the Romanian service.

Living in retirement in Brighton, he taught himself classical Chinese, Basque and several other languages and translated academic works, mainly from Russian and German. He also played the piano and taught himself "tensor calculus" ("I wanted to know what the cosmologists were talking about," he told his former BBC colleague).

Another BBC colleague, George Mikes, recalled in the Guardian newspaper a few years ago that he had made a point of asking native speakers at the BBC about Campbell's facility.

"All said that his knowledge was not only adequate but amazing," Mikes wrote.

We can conclude from this article, that motivation plays a huge part in the desire and ability to learn a foreign language.....or many more. Most of us have a huge capacity to learn foreign languages, or anything else for that matter, but inertia and general laziness halt us from achieving our potential......

Food for thought for teachers of foreign languages, and language learners. If you want to - you can do it! (just like the Nike ad. says....).

[FGT]

Enoch Powell learnt a new language every year in order to keep his brain alert. I'm not an admirer of his politics but I do admire that in him. He studied Classics at university which would have served as a good basis for most European languages. During/after the war he served in India where he branched out. He then just continued building. Bravo I say!

[ghost]

Yes - and it`s a pity that we remember Powell more for his political views, which some would call ``racist`` and others a form of ``protectionism.``

The man was a great speaker, and his erudition impressive and eclectic. But then again most brilliant minds always arouse controversy with the average ``hoi polloi.``