Mario Pei

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Mario Andrew Pei (1901-1978) was an Italian-American linguist and polyglot, who wrote a number of fairly popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics, and for their abundance of factual errors and urban myths.

Pei was born in Rome, Italy, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1908. By the time he was out of high school he knew not only English and his native Italian but also Latin, Greek, and French. Over the years he became fluent in five languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and German) capable of speaking some 30 others, and acquainted with the structure of at least 100 of the world's languages.

He moved to Columbia University in 1934 and became professor of Romance Languages in 1952.

Besides the best-sellers The Story of Language (1949) and The Story of English (1952), he published a large number of works, including Languages for War and Peace (1943), A Dictionary of Linguistics (written with Frank Gaynor, 1954), All about language (1954), Invitation to linguistics: a basic introduction to the science of language (1965), and Weasel Words: Saying What You Don't Mean (1978).

Pei also penned The America We Lost: The Concerns of a Conservative (1968), a book advocating individualism, constitutional literalism, and other paleoconservative principles. In the book, Pei denounces the income tax, as well as communism and other forms of collectivism.

Mario Pei was also an internationalist who advocated the introduction of Esperanto into school curricula across the world to supplement local languages.