Vavilov the linguist

Odd, but entirely understandable, that Vavilov was put off by the languages of China and Japan. Gary Nabhan notes his prowess as a linguist.

Vavilov collected, compared and conserved far more than the plants themselves; he was just as intent on recording the native names, uses and lore found among the various agrarian communities that he visited. These provided each fruit or seed he collected with an ecological, cultural or culinary context. He would have never been able to pick up so many clues about a plant’s immunity to disease or resistance to post-harvest insects if he had only spoken Russian. As if preparing for a life of wanderlust, Vavilov had somehow become the quintessential polyglot at a rather early age. Before departing for Petrovsky from the gymnasium, he had already developed his reading skills in German, English, Latin, French and Italian. While at the Agricultural Institute, he took advance tutorials in English so that by the time he first visited London in 1913, he had the capacity to converse with the finest scholars who taught there. By the time of his death, Vavilov was so conversant in some fifteen languages—including Farsi, Turkic and Amharic—that he fired any translators in the field who could not give him accurate running summaries of his conversations with the scientists and farmers hosting him in various countries.

Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.