ILLUSTRATES Pablo Carranza
QUESTION Quincas Carneiro Silva, Curitiba, PR
According to Guinnessis retired US military Gregg M. Cox, able to read and write in 64 languages (14 of them fluently) and 11 dialects. But there are also extraordinary cases that were not recorded in the record books. Gaucho Carlos Amaral Freire, 82 years old, has already studied 135 languages. “For more than 50 years, I’ve learned two new ones a year. But I don’t have the vanity of being the world’s greatest polyglot,” he says. “Just to talk to my family I need five languages: Basque, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Portuguese.” He is the author of the book Babel de Poemas, with texts translated from 60 different languages into Portuguese. He has recently studied Low German (spoken in northern Germany) and Sicilian, and revised five other languages.
Oh, and an extra curiosity: anyone who speaks more than six languages fluently is called a “hyperpolyglot”.
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