language learning, way back when

[emk]

If you believe Plutarch (always a chancy business), Cleopatra was a fairly skilled polyglot, who knew many of the languages of the people she ruled:

There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.

I imagine she would have access to tutors. But still, even being conversational in this many languages would be a major project.

[Herodotean]

Another anecdote, courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti:

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Explorations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 95-96:

I think of a jolly old philosopher named John Alexander Smith. (I spent an unforgettable year reading Aristotle's Metaphysics in a seminar with him and H.H. Joachim.) He was not a dry logic-chopper or a gloomy metaphysical brooder, but a sharp, bold, critical thinker, with some delightful personal eccentricities, such as having a huge library of whodunits, and grading each of them alpha, beta, gamma, or delta after reading it. After he grew to man's estate, he learned a new language every year of his life. He always taught himself, and he always used the same method. Choosing his language, he got hold of a translation of the Bible in it, and started to read, beginning either with the Book of Genesis, or with one of the Gospels, since he knew these books pretty well by heart. By the time he had finished one book of Scripture, he had a grasp of the general pattern of the language. After finishing one of the Testaments, he could read fluently. When he had finished the entire Bible, he could read and write the new language and could make a shot at talking it when necessary.

Smith is presumably this fellow.

[cito]

Speaking of language learning, way back then, here's an interesting link to an old-French (written with the Coptic script) and Arabic phrase book . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic%E2%80%93Old_French_glossary

[MorkTheFiddle]

What a fun find. (Haven't given a heart cause my Ajax isn't working.)