An urbane man fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French, Mr. Milosz had established close associations with leading left-wing intellectuals in Paris.
Rzepkowski and his brother, both fluent in Polish, made their fortunes in Eastern Europe running an import-export business, trading in "everything from used clothes to oil pipelines".
New statistics show that a modern Briton is likely to be fluent in Polish, now our second language, in which case barszcz ought to be included along with fish and chips.
Fluent in Polish and German, an Oxford historian with a Fleet Street metabolism, Garton Ash was writing from Eastern and Central Europe (particularly in the New York Review of Books) when nearly everyone else saw the region as static and uninteresting.
"I tried, and they said, 'Are you fluent in Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian or Russian?' I said, 'Well, no – I'm English.' They said, 'Well, you're no good to us.' You get the same in the factories: 'You need to understand another language to get on with people.'" Plenty of people – here and elsewhere – claim such issues are real, but endlessly denied.
Shalikashvili, who was fluent in Polish, German and Russian, learned to speak English by watching American movies, his speech at one time peppered with John Wayne phrases delivered in a Polish accent.
The word "facetious" (Latin facetus) did not have the overtone of waggish jocularity we now give it: it referred to witty, elegant, fluent humour – "polished and agreeable" in the OED's definition.
He is bilingual in English and Polish, fluent in Russian, and proficient in German and French.
It would be another full year before he truly conversed; but once he did, his fluent English and Polish (his mother, Anna, 40, is from Krakow) were soon joined by other languages.
They are fluent in three languages — Polish, French and English".
