My good friend Professor Carl Dolmetsch is one of the most learned men I know. Some years back, he wrote a fascinating and highly acclaimed book called Our Famous Guest, which details the 20 months that Mark Twain and his wife spent in Vienna so their daughter Clara could study music.

On my own two visits to Vienna, I was privileged to have Carl as my host and guide. He loves the city, where was born and spent his early childhood, and he also loves to tease unwary tourists like me. I remember an occasion when he was showing me one of Vienna’s many beautiful churches. As we were about to leave, he turned to me and remarked, with studied casualness, “You know, don’t you, that Mozart composed the C-minor Mass for performance in this church?”

He paused to let my jaw drop, and then pointed a finger to the organ loft. “Mozart conducted from right there,” he concluded with an impish grin.

Carl is now retired and in his mid-eighties, but he’s as mentally alert and playful as ever. He just published an essay on “The Joys of English” for the newsletter of the retirement community where he lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The following excerpt from this essay is reprinted with his permission and good wishes:

“English is, so to speak, like a sponge. It began developing that way in the fifth century A.D. when the Roman governor of Britain invited the Angles and the Saxons, Teutonic tribes who spoke a dialect of Old Low German, to cross the North Sea and help him defend his Roman colony against its Celtic natives. Anglo-Saxon (or Old English to give it its proper name) began almost immediately to pick up words and pronunciations from the Celtic languages –- Welsh and Scots Gaelic –- and, soon after the British Isles were Christianized, from Vulgate Latin. Then, a few centuries later, came the Norman conquest of England, after which French became the language of the ruling class and many generations later was amalgamated with Old English to become what we call Middle English –- the language of Chaucer…

“One could say of our language in the poet’s words, 'I am a part of all I have seen.' Consider, for instance, the contribution of our 180 Native American languages, with words like canoe, wigwam, raccoon, opossum, succotash, hickory, pecan, tobacco, moccasin, potato and dozens more as well as the names of many of our cities, rivers, mountains and states. Think of the words brought here by the Africans we enslaved: yam, okra, banjo, jazz, voodoo, zombie and many more. The British went out to India and other parts of the Far East and brought back to us as well as to England words like bungalow, veranda, pajamas, kimono, et al. In short, we have borrowed freely from every language on the globe.”

Carl also wrote a book about The Smart Set -- a literary magazine of the early 1920s edited by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. It was the forerunner of The New Yorker. As part of his research for that book, Carl interviewed Mencken himself a few years before the celebrated journalist died.

But that’s another story.