E.R.SUNIL KUMAR: ABILITY TO READ AND WRITE 45 LANGUAGES
 |
| E.R.Sunil Kumar, Thrissur |
He has not traveled outside Kerala even once, but 45 languages around the globe are his companions. E.R.Sunil Kumar, an accountant in a Thrissur firm claims to have the ability to read and write 45 languages, 8 of which he can speak fluently and many others with less fluency.
Be it the Indian derivatives of Sanskrit or the ones based on Latin script like Spanish, German or French or the right-to-left-written languages like Urdu or Hebrew or even the top-to-bottom ones like Mongolian or Manchu, Sunil Kumar finds a rare pleasure in developing a working knowledge in them.
His interest in languages began at school when a friend urged him to learn Tamil. “I have learned many of these languages from books and internet sites,” he says. While he has taken pains to learn even old languages like Gothic, Coptic and scripts such as Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Perso-Arabic, what use does he or others find from his labyrinthine quest? People approach him to read manuals of consumer durables, especially those made in China, he says.
“I won’t call myself a polyglot. True that I can read and write 45 languages, but I won’t claim to have deep knowledge of these languages that would warrant the status of a polyglot. I study languages just for fun. I have never been able to use my language skills to get a better job,” he says.
Perhaps his comparative linguistic knowledge could be made use of by wordsmiths or other lovers of language.
Courtesy:
K.Santhosh (text), K.K.Najeeb (photo), The Hindu, May 17, 2005
Contributed by: Administrator
