Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0
In the early 18th century Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) lived as the wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul:
"I live in a place that very well represents the Tower of Babel; in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoke in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English, and Germans; my nurse an Armenian; my housemaids Russians; half a dozen other servants Greeks; my steward an Italian; my janissaries Turks, that I live in perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letter 41, in: Heffernan, Turkish Embassy Letters 2013, p. 163. See also Mansel, Constantinople 2006, pp. 207–210; Dursteler, Speaking in Tongues 2012, pp. 47–48.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), lithography, year unknown, artist: A. Devéria nafter C. F. Zincke; source: Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/n648jdnf, 
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de.
