the English prodigy and polymath Thomas Young. Born in 1773 in Milverton, Somerset, Young was able to read fluently at the age of two. By the age of fourteen he had studied Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic, and when he became a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his brilliance gained him the sobriquet “Phenomenon Young.”
