Talk:Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti

Illyrian
If Illyrian was extinct by the 6th century AD, how was it that Mezzofanti was speaking them perfectly more than one thousand years later? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.21.38 (talk) 02:31, 1 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Apparently because the article gives the material written by Charles William Russell in Wikipedia's voice. The sad thing is that I am replying to a seven years old comment, and the problem hasn't been fixed. --dab (𒁳) 12:38, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I see that the article was changed to say "Serbo-Croatian". I have slightly changed the text to better reflect the source, which states He had the repute also of being thoroughly familiar with both branches of the Illyrian family-the Slavonic and the Romanic. This is a bit confusing, and would not pass muster by the standards of modern linguistics, given that there is no single "Illyrian" family with Slavic and Romance branches. But we can take the latter to likely refer to the Dalmatian language. The former could be taken to refer to Serbo-Croatian, but it is probably more accurate to enumerate it as Croatian, given that the source enumerates Servian (the dialects of Bosnia and of the Bannat separately, and indeed in a different category (category III spoken rarely), from "Illyrian" (category I, frequently tested). Brusquedandelion (talk) 04:03, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Spelling?
- Why is 40 (forty) spelled fourty in italics? - Wasn't Pope John Paul II a polyglot? Frank Landsman (talk) 16:17, 8 September 2008 (UTC)