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Personal note
Just passed the 23rd anniversary of losing my best friend, and father in law, Bill Avery. Died of a heart attack on March 20, 1985. I found this photo of him in my former wife's effects (she died of cancer May 22, 2003). Bill was a brilliant linquist, founded the Dep't of Classical Languages at the University of Maryland. When the Post called up for an obit, Fran said that he was fluent in six languages. The reporter said -- he spoke six languages? Fran answered, no, he was fluent in them. His test for fluency was that if a native speaker could tell you were not one, you weren't fluent. I once heard a Spaniard ask him what part of Spain he was from, and Fran said that in Italy he passed for a Mafia Don (he loved the Sicilian dialect; I think he could do three dialects). If you just mean languages where he could converse, oh, you'd have to add Hindi and several others.
And he had such a sense of humor! We were dining one night and the waiter was from India. Bill asked him about the Beef Wellington, and he replied that being Hindu he could hardly say. Bill responded with something I couldn't understand, and the waiter broke up laughing and said "that is so!" I asked Bill what he'd said, and he replied it was Hindi for "the English are such pigs." It was a phrase higher-caste Hindus (who were required to take seven baths a day, and were being bossed around by folks who bathed far less often) often used when he was there in WWII.
He was a sergeant in the Army, doing translation, and the officers told him he'd make a great officer, why was a guy with a PhD and postdoctoral work just a noncom? He pointed out that the odds of a noncom translator being KIA was quite low, which could not be said of an infantry 2nd Lieutenant!
Comments
He sounds like a truly interesting person. I ran into a PhD Corporal back in the late 60's who took a similar view of risk assessment. I don't know what his standard for fluency was, but Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel Laureate in Physics, is supposed to be fluent in at least 13 languages and speak close to 30. (He may well have increased his count by now.) His father ran a language school when he was growing up, and he learns difficult languages as a sort of hobby. Years ago I heard Richard Feynman mention that Murray had taken a leave from Cal Tech for a semester in order to learn Navajo.
Posted by: Ken at March 24, 2008 11:13 AM