Note 12 — Chapter XIV · THE EXILE OF DAPITAN

In philology, Rizal won the friendship and esteem of Dr. Reinhold Rost, said to have been the greatest philologist of the nineteenth century, and was himself one of its most wonderful polyglots. While he was at Dapitan, to baffle the censor, he wrote a letter to his sister that he began in colloquial German, carried on in colloquial English, and concluded in colloquial French.12 But this was for him a most trifling exploit and hardly worth noticing. Besides these and Spanish, of which he was a master, he spoke Latin, Greek, Arab, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Visayan, and the Moro dialects of Dapitan. One of his papers, a scientific treatise on the Visayan language, was read before the Ethnographical Society of Berlin. He was associated with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Blumentritt in the annotation of a Chinese codicil of the Middle Ages. While at Dapitan he began to write a scientific Tagalog grammar and a treatise on the resemblances between Tagalog and Visayan speech. To amuse himself he would sometimes adorn a title-page or drawing with quotations in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Japanese, Spanish, and English.