Английская Википедия:Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti
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Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti (17 September 1774 – 15 March 1849) was an Italian cardinal known for being a hyperpolyglot.
Life
Born in Bologna, he showed exceptional mnemonic, musical, and language learning skills from a young age. He studied with the Piarists, where he met several missionaries from various countries. By speaking with them he began learning several new languages including Swedish, German, Spanish, and languages of Indigenous peoples of South America, as well as studying Latin and Ancient Greek in school. He completed his theological studies before he had reached the minimum age for ordination as a priest. In 1797 he was ordained and became professor of Arabic, Hebrew, languages of Asia, and Greek at the University of Bologna. The same year, Mezzofanti tutored the eldest son of Georgiana Hare-Naylor.[1][2]
Mezzofanti lost his university position for refusing to take the oath of allegiance required by the Cisalpine Republic, which governed Bologna at the time. Between 1799 and 1800 he visited many foreign people who had been wounded during the Napoleonic Wars to attend to them and started to learn other European languages.
In 1803, he was appointed assistant librarian of the Institute of Bologna, and soon afterwards was reinstated as professor of Oriental languages and Ancient Greek. The chair of Oriental languages was suppressed by the viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais in 1808, but again rehabilitated on the restoration of Pope Pius VII in 1814. Mezzofanti held this post until he went to Rome in 1831 as a member of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide), the Catholic Church's governing body for missionary activities.
In 1833, he succeeded Angelo Mai as Custodian-in-Chief of the Vatican Library, and in 1838 was made cardinal of Sant'Onofrio and director of studies in the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.[3] His other interests included ethnology, archaeology, numismatics, and astronomy.
List of languages spoken
The precise number of languages known to Mezzofanti is uncertain. Mezzofanti's nephew gives a list of 114 languages.[4] Charles Russell's biography gives a list of thirty languages "frequently tested, and spoken with rare excellence:"[5]
Another nine were "spoken fluently, but hardly sufficiently tested": Syriac, Ge'ez, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, Romanian, Californian,[6] and Algonquin.[5]
See also
Notes
References
- Alphons Bellesheim, Giuseppe Cardinal Mezzofanti (Würzburg, 1880)
- Charles William Russell, Life of the Cardinal Mezzofanti (1858)
- Augustin Manavitt, Esquisse historique sur le cardinal Mezzofanti (1853)
- U. Benigni, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, Catholic Encyclopedia (1911)
- Шаблон:CathEncy
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- Английская Википедия
- 1774 births
- 1849 deaths
- Clergy from Bologna
- 19th-century Italian cardinals
- Italian philologists
- Italian librarians
- Cardinals created by Pope Gregory XVI
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