tolkien

I'll bet he could read Old High German and Middle High German. If you know Old English, OHG is not much of a challenge, and if you know OE and modern German, neither is MHG.

Hardly any Lombardic (the Germanic language of the Lombards/Langobardi) survives. If you had it all in one place, you could familiarize yourself with the entire surviving corpus in ten minutes.

I'll bet he could read all the Germanic languages on the list with a dictionary at hand. I bet he had read some Old (Church) Slavonic. Wouldn't venture a guess about Russian and Lithuanian.

You list 25 languages. Add one for Modern English. Add 14 (which for Jorge Luis Borges is just another name for infinity) for the number of languages he constructed in his head. And that makes 40!
If you had a bet with this guy, I would recommend a plea bargain.

Polyglots include the following.. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism]

I really don't know if Middle English ought to be counted as a separate language from Modern English. You could learn it as well as you need to (i.e.e to read it) in a matter of hours or days.

In my second year at Merton College, I lodged in a building on Holywell St which had been JRRT's rooms, where he continued to live for some years after his formal retirement. (Though he also lived in some other rooms over the street for a while.) This was sufficiently recent that we still had the same "scout" (cleaner/caretaker) who had been there at the time, and who was keen to remind us of this at every possible opportunity. I suppose there was an element of "I used to look after a famous and distinguished professor and now I have to look after you slobbish nonentities."

We had another polyglot at Merton, who was not mentioned on the list at #3's reference, namely JR Lucas, the philosopher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John<u>Lucas</u>(philosopher) It was said he claimed to be able to speak about 25 languages at least conversationally, and to be able to translate rather more. There was a rumour going the rounds current that someone arranged to have a Hungarian phone him up and see if he could indeed, as claimed, speak enough Hungarian to answer the phone to one, Hungarian being one of the more unlikely languages he claimed to be able to speak. It was said that confirmation had been obtained in that manner. JR Lucas was a very rare beast in the academic world those days, being one of the last examples of an eminent academic who never took a doctorate. He was notably eccentric. His gown had gone green with mould or something growing on it, and had tears mended with duct tape, and he called his dog Quinquagessima. Though we weren't short of eccentrics: the late John Barton, Professor of Roman Law, was often seen walking around college a large and colourful parrot chained to a leather pad on his shoulder.

Hey, I'm fluent in 40 lanauges too, then. I speak 2010's English, 2000's English, 1990's English, 1980's English, ...

You can be similarly multiligual with different dialects of a single language. Anyone fluent in Serbian is also fluent in Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin,

#6 -- I was talking about that recently. There must be people whose grandfather spoke one language (Serbo-Croatian), whose father spoke two (Serbian and Croatian), and who themselves speak four (add Bosnian and Montenegrin), without anybody going to the trouble of studying anything.

#7 You don't have to go back several generations. Until the early 1990s, the people in Yugoslavia were all speaking Serbo-Croatian.

#7 You don't have to go back several generations. Until the early 1990s, the people in Yugoslavia were all speaking Serbo-Croatian.

If I were Slovenian, Macedonian, or an Albanian-speaking Kosovar I might be extremely surprised to hear that.