Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 9

me
when she heard I had written about 31 languages with Hebrew among
them. Kató Lomb studies Hebrew at the Budapest University. It is the
17th language she speaks. She is a synchron translator. She speaks in
16 languages, but as she said in an interview, the number of languages
by which she has already earned money is about 30. She wrote four
books about languages, her language learning method, other
multilingual people, and her journeys around the world as a translator.
She autographed one of her books and gave it to me. I had brought two
others with me and she autographed those as well. The fourth title I
bought the next week in a secondhand book shop. In a week’s time I
had read all four of the books with much enjoyment.
The next month I invited this lovely pair to our secondary school. I
wanted our students to have the pleasure of getting acquainted with
these two language fans. Mrs. Kató Lomb gave a lecture to the students
about her language learning method, and another lecture for teachers
about how language learning can make the retired person’s everyday

life more interesting. Mr. Németh delivered a lecture about his trip to a
far land to find a people who speak a language distantly relative to
Hungarian. He also showed a video film he made while visiting this
Hanti group in Siberia.
> I found someone, my husband’s patient, who studied and speaks
Turkish.
> Somebody else translated the text into Hungarian Gipsy language.
> Father of may daughter’s classmate translated the text into Classic
Greek.
> My eldest brother organised some more languages for me. I went to
the Netherlands and Germany with him to collect his bronze figures
from galleries there. He needed them for his great exhibition in
Budapest. We visited his friend, my Dutch translator Theo, the
Hollander and his wife. They were astonished while I told them I had
translations in 43 languages, they didn’t think there were so many
languages in Europe. But later on the wife took a book from the
bookshelf in which we could read there were 2796 languages in the
world and the number of dialects were 7000-8000. So the 50 languages
I plan for my book is only a small slice of this rich world of languages.
> Theo wanted to enrich my collection so he promised to organise the
West Frisian translation for me, a language spoken in the Netherlands
by a minority group.
> At my brother’s friend in Hamburg I met a bilingual Chinese man.
He translated the short story into Chinese.
Now I must finish collecting languages. I have about 50
translations--the number I promised to my sponsor in publishing the
book. Or maybe not. Perhaps I should leave this book open and ask my
reader who may know any language not present here, to translate the
short story into that language and send it to me, (address: 3300 Eger,
Széchenyi u. 9. Hungary). In the second edition I would like to present
the other 2746 languages.
Story of the further 27 languages
The above appeal reached my readers and some of them joined into the
game. With their help and suggestions from new and old friends,
another 27 languages came together in the last 4 years.
Here you have the story of this collection:
A retired chief of ophthalmology phoned me to say he had read my

book, enjoyed it, liked the idea and had a lot of pen-friends around the
world. He collected 8 languages for me (Afrikaans, Chicheva, Saxon in
Transylvania, Portuguese, Swahili, Welsh, Zulu and Manx).
We had a French guest and it came to light that he lived in Bretagne
and his neighbour’s mother-tongue is Breton, so after returning home
he sent me the Breton translation.
The Hanti translation was promised me some years ago during the
Ugro-Finn writer’s meeting in Eger by a woman writer and she sent me
the Hanti translation by manuscript which I could hardly read and
transliterate. I asked her in a letter to type it but she did not answer.
Later on I looked for somebody who knew Hanti in Budapest and
Szombathely but I was not successful in finding one. In the end I put
this hardly legible text into the second edition.
One of my dear library visitors in the school, Jutka Adorján liked my
book and told me her cousin was of the Ibo mother-tongue and asked
him, the agriculture student, to translate the short story into this African
language.
I got to know fans of artificial languages as enthusiastic people. Thanks
to Vilmos Bõsz, the creator of the Vikto language for allowing me to
use it in the first edition of my book. He has a rather large pen- and
language