Linguist Masters Esperanto After Brief Study

Are you taking notes in
Esperanto, Professor?

This sounds like one of those Internet come-on ads “Language Professors Hate this Man!” In this case, the man was Professor Walter Skeat, who was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University. While I don’t have any books by Skeat in my library, the name was immediately familiar to me as a prominent scholar of the medieval forms of English in the late nineteenth and early early twentieth centuries. Despite the name of his position (in full the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon), Skeat’s major contributions concerned the Middle English poets Chaucer and Langland.

I’m going to hazard a guess and assume that in addition to Old, Middle, and Modern English, Gothic (Skeat produced a work on Gothic), and German (Wikipedia notes his annoyance at German domination of English studies in his day), as a member of the clergy (professor and reverend), he probably also knew Latin, Greek, and maybe even Hebrew. That leaves only French (which is a possibility) and Polish (unlikely) to cover the roots of Esperanto.

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