William Jones mastered thirteen languages and sampled twenty-eight

Evidence

According to the twentieth-century Turcologist Harold Bowen, Sir William Jones (1746–94), also known as ‘Oriental Jones’, mastered thirteen languages and dabbled in twenty-eight. As a schoolboy he started off with Hebrew but, finding that language too easy to be interesting, he then moved on to Arabic. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 215

Categorization

• CANDY: A delightful party-trick fact: a schoolboy abandoned Hebrew because it was too easy.