taken for granted...

I knew dad had a gift for languages -- that he'd taught himself the rudiments of Finnish and Lappish when he went on a field trip there in his youth, for example, and that at some point on that visit he'd had to communicate in esperanto with a little old lady running a post office

but in two separate tributes, old colleagues have noted that he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read some scientific papers on a particular type of landscape: karst

he was always diffident about this, made out he was no good really -- though of course he wrote poetry in french, which is a pretty big ask: mallarmé was his favourite poet -- and i guess i just unthinkingly took him at his word

my grandad had always done the churchill thing, of speaking excellent french in a deliberate and stubbornly english accent -- hence (perhaps?) dad, who had a complicated relationship with his father, went the other way, and was meticulous about pronunciation