Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 9

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 B?sz, 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 friend circle and through his efforts I received additional translations in 4 more artificial languages. These languages (Interlingua, Volapük, Glosa and Unitario) came from Budapest, Germany and England. From Lithuania I received the Lithuanian translation which was interpreted by the wife and daughter of a man who wrote me an accompanying letter in Interlingua. My eldest brother, a sculptor has an Armenian sculptor friend who translated the Armenian text.
Another sculptor friend of my brother, Mihály Bohn has trouble with his kidney so he has to go for dialysis 3 times a week. There, in his hospital bed, pleaded with his nurse, a medical student, to translate the story into Persian, his mother tongue.
And again laryngologists. A colleague of my husband who knew about my language gathering enthusiasm discovered that a new laryngologist in the Szeged HNO Clinic speaks two languages not yet present in my