So this Catholic cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti is supposed to have spoken 40 languages fluently. 40! Crazy. I feel small. (Mastery of “Mexican” and “Californian” seem a bit suspect, however…)

I found this information from a post called The 40 language dash on an interesting linguistics blog called Blogos. The post also gets into Cleopatra’s alleged polyglossia, and even uses the very interesting term “glosserotics.”

(For more linguistics blogs, check my linguistics+blog del.icio.us links.)