King of Italy's Prize for Language Scholarship
Won by Humble Toiler
Who Amazes Europe.
Alfredo Trombetti, who won the King of Italy's Prize for Languages, has a
remarkable history. In 1903 King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, carrying out
his plan for encouraging education, offered a prize of ten thousand
_lire_--two thousand dollars--for the best contribution to the study of
languages. Hundreds of Italian scholars competed. But the work of the
judges was facilitated by the fact that one man so far distanced the
others that there could be absolute unanimity in making the award. The
successful treatise was in five volumes, and was a remarkable study and
comparison of ancient languages, into which the author had compressed a
store of knowledge that astounded the learned judges.
The writer was Trombetti. Those who passed on his work had never before
heard of him. They looked him up, and their astonishment at his erudition
was heightened when they found he was a poor teacher in a little academy
at Cuneo, a town with a population of thirty thousand. He, in turn, was
astonished that the reward should come to him, for he was as modest as he
was poor. His salary was less than two hundred and fifty dollars a year,
and on this he supported a family of seven. The prize amounted to two
thousand dollars--a sum greater than he could earn in eight years of
teaching. He was master of fifty languages and dialects.
Learned from Customers.
They found he was a simple, enthusiastic man, without much knowledge of
the world and of its ways. He had been living among books practically all
his life, and they represented everything to him, and for them he had
sacrificed practically everything. But underneath the naivete there were
the solidity and thoroughness of the scholar. Trombetti had cultivated his
natural aptitude for languages by the most exhaustive studies and at a
cost few men would care to meet. After the dull routine and hard work of
the school year he employed his vacations in traveling about from one
library to another in order to consult and study the books he could not
afford to buy. On these trips black bread, wayside pot-herbs, and fruit
given him from vineyards and orchards formed his fare.
He managed to buy some books, painfully saving the money cent by cent, and
when other scholars discovered him he had already gathered together a
fairly good library. In that library the chief place was occupied by a
tattered old French grammar, a book he had bought for five cents when a
boy, and from which he had learned his first foreign language.
"How did you manage to acquire such an amount of knowledge?" one of the
judges asked him.
"I began when I was a barber," he said.
"A barber!"
"Yes. When a man sat in my chair I let him talk. I got from one a new
word, from another a new variation in dialect. So even there I was
learning all the time."
Faculty Not Easily Acquired.
The faculty of learning languages, he said, was not easily acquired. It
took him longer to gain a reading knowledge of French, despite the fact
that French and Italian have an enormous number of words derived from the
same common source, than it took him to learn Russian and Hebrew--the
fifth and sixth languages he began to study--although both the latter are
much more difficult than French.
"I had taught myself how to study," he said, "how to systematize, and make
everything I had previously learned help me in everything I undertook. I
know from my own case that any one can learn a language if he is
determined and will give a little time each day to it."
So, by pursuing the method he had learned, Trombetti had placed himself,
as far as the number of languages understood is concerned, with Cardinal
Mezzofanti, who spoke fifty-eight.
The winning of the king's prize when Trombetti was thirty-seven years old,
and after he had struggled amid the direst privations, changed the whole
current of his life. He was appointed a professor at the University of
Bologna. Linguists everywhere placed their collections at his service, for
they recognized that the work he had already done would facilitate the
researches and studies of all future inquirers. The scholars of the United
States were especially prompt, and the Bureau of Ethnology, when he
announced his intention of making a comparative study of Indian languages,
sent him a large and valuable collection of works on the subject.