The most famous POLYGLOT??? 5 stars to the winner!!?

Question

I GIVE 5 STARS FOR THAT GUY WHO WILL THELL ME WHO THE MOST FAMOUS POLYGLOT IS/WAS!!

p.s. 2 STARS FOR ORIGINALITY!!!

Answer 1

People seem to just be looking at the list of polyglots in wikipedia and choosing the ones who reputedly know/knew the largest number of languages. But the folks in the upper tiers of this list are names that most of us have never heard, they could hardly qualify as "MOST FAMOUS"!!

For that honor you would have to at least go with someone many have heard of and presumably whom they KNOW (or would if they thought about it) can or could speak many languages.

Some possibilities
-- well-known authors like James Joyce or J.R.R. Tolkien (both of whom also made up languages of their own!)
-- an international figure who learned many languages to communicate with people from different cultures -- like John Paul II (knew perhaps 11 languages)

-- or how about polglot and poly-MATH! Thomas Jefferson

BTW, since people are using it anyway, here's the link to the wikipedia list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polyglots

Answer 2

Ziad Fazah born June 10, 1954, Monrovia in Liberia, claims to speak 63 languages.
The lists of languages:
Albanian, German, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Burmese, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Wu, Sinhalese, Singapore Colloquial English, Korean, Danish, Dzongkha, Spanish, Finnish, French, Fijian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Dutch, Hungarian, Indonesian, English, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Swahili, Lao, Malay, Malagasy, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Papiamento, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Pashto, Kyrgyz, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Czech, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek and Vietnamese.

Answer 3

Complutensian Polyglot Bible

Ziad Fazah born June 10, 1954, claims to speak 63 languages.
Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774–1849), Italian ecclesiast, is reported to have spoken thirty-eight languages and fifty dialects fluently.
Emil Krebs German sinologist (1867–1930). Spoke 68 languages fluently, and understood more than 50 further languages

Answer 4

Handel could reputedly swear in nine different languages, and he was pretty famous...