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knowledge of it, on a level with the majority of the natives.” In addition to perfect pronunciation, Watts also noted that the cardinal “conversed” in his languages, greeting people with “great spirit and precision.” In his reckoning, the real measure of a rare ability would lie inconversation.
    The thirty (as listed by Russell) were Hebrew, Rabbinical Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, Coptic, Ancient Armenian, Modern Armenian, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, Greek, Romaic, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, * English, Illyrian, Russian, Polish, Czech (which Russell calls Bohemian), Hungarian, and Chinese.
    Interestingly, thesewere the thirty languages he’d learned before he was thirty years old, according to reports. They represented a whoppingeleven linguistic families, * five of which (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Hellenic, and Semitic) gave him the bulk of his acquisitions. With that much learning experience, each language would have become a small variation on a broader theme, providing a learning boost for eachsubsequent one. If he read these languages, he would have grappled with six different alphabets (I knew that he didn’t read Chinese—trying to do so caused him some sort of breakdown—so I don’t count it here).
    On a total language count, Watts and Russell would eventually disagree. Russell said Mezzofanti had seventy-two languages, a number with some religious significance: it was the number oflanguages that was said to have resulted from the Tower of Babel’s fall. Watts disputed some of Russell’s sources, eliminated duplications, and without mentioning Russell’s overlay of religious symbolism, reduced the overall repertoire to sixty or sixty-one.
    But their fractiousness is superficial. Neither scholar doubted Mezzofanti’s achievement or its glory, and, interestingly, neither one invokedthe divine (angels, tongues of fire) to explain his gifts, not even Russell, for whom Mezzofanti’s figure carried a religious charge. More significant, they both agreed that Mezzofanti had mastered thirty languages. Mastered them.
    Despite Russell’s careful accounting and Watts’s surgical follow-up, disentangling Mezzofanti from folk legend and the preoccupations of his contemporaries is far fromstraightforward. It’s not only a matter of how you define what it means to speak a language; it also matters who does the listening.
    We commonly assume that native speakers are qualified to judge how well someone uses their language. But their opinions of another’s mastery can take a cultural coloring. In Bologna, Italians welcomed my small attempts with praise, as have Mexicans and Colombianswith Spanish. In Taiwan and China, people responded to my elementary abilities with polite enthusiasm: “Oh, you speak Chinese very well!” “Really,you don’t have to be so polite,” I’d reply in Chinese. I took the titters of shocked delight to mean that the sophistication of the reply (which I’d learned from a friend) had outstripped their true opinion of my skill.
    By contrast, the French arevehemently uninterested in having a foreigner mangle their language—in stereotype, anyway. Theoretically, French natives would rate you lower in French than Spaniards would in Spanish. In Japan and Korea, a lower-skilled non-native will be highly regarded and praised, while someone with better skills will be viewed as a threat. Former US ambassador William Rugh, who was posted to Yemen and the UnitedArab Emirates, once counseled that if you’re a non-native Arabic speaker appearing on Arabic-language media, it’s better to keep a conversation going than to worry about being grammatically correct; the effort, which is appreciated by Arab audiences, looks good diplomatically. For cultural reasons, Arab audiences also prefer truthful speech, so they are more tolerant of imperfect Arabic than ofan interpreter, who may alter what a person means. So various are all these