Story By: Anastasia Smirnova, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder,Agency: Central European New
Video Credit: CEN/SvetlanaSpirina
This is the incredible four-year-old Russian boy who knows the alphabets from 46 different languages including Hebrew, Japanese, English, Greek and Arabic.
Wonderkid Tamerlan Spirin, from the city of Kazan in the western Russian republic of Tatarstan, has shown an interest in alphabets since he was 10 months old, according to local media.
His nanny Anastasia said: “He talks about letters all day long and it is impossible to make him do something else if he doesn’t want to.”
His father Ayrat Spirin told local media: “He has been surrounded by letters since birth. When he was a baby, I bought him a rug with the alphabet on it and then we got him lettered building blocks.”
In an exclusive interview with Central European News (CEN), the bright boy’s TV presenter mum Svetlana Spirina, who works for Tatarstan Business Channel, said: “He did not have anything apart from the alphabet rug and a bookshelf with classical literature, including works by Turgenev, Pushkin, Yesenin and Akhmatova. That was it.”
She said that he started developing a love for alphabets on his own and family members encouraged his unusual passion.
Video Credit: CEN/SvetlanaSpirina
Svetlana told CEN: “We started giving him new alphabets that we printed off the Internet. Now he does that by himself.”
By the time he was one year old, Tamerlan already knew three alphabets: Russian, Tatar and English.
When talking about Tamerlan’s first words, his mother, who works as a presenter on regional television, said: “I heard him saying Turgenev’s ‘Otsi i Deti’ (‘Fathers and Sons’). Then it turned out that he read it on the back of the book.”
Svetlana said that her son is now able to read and write the alphabets from 46 different languages: Abkhaz, Avar, Albanian, English, Armenian, Arabic, Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Glagolitic (the oldest known Slavic script), Greek, Georgian, Danish, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Khmer, Chinese, Latin, Macedonian, Mari, German, Norwegian, Ossetian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Tajik, Tatar, Udmurt, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Urdu, Chechen, Czech, Chuvash, Finnish, Phoenician, French, Croatian, Swedish, Estonian, Japanese Katakana and Japanese Hiragana.
Video Credit: CEN/SvetlanaSpirina
Little Tamerlan is reportedly fluent in Russian and Mandarin and knows a lot of words in English, Armenian, Bashkir and Tatar. He also attends a specialised polylingual nursery, according to local media.
Svetlana said: “What he is interested in are alphabets, how they are written, how they are spoken, phonetics. He is interested in analysing the alphabets rather than learning the language.”
According to his mum, the boy has spent 90 minutes every evening for two and a half years researching different alphabets on the internet.
She told CEN: “We are a simple family. I am a journalist, his father is a local official and neither of us is gifted with what he has.”
Svetlana stresses that it is too soon to talk about his possible future career and notes that her son always says he will simply be Tamerlan when he grows up.
She added: “I don’t know if he will become a polyglot or cryptographer, I can’t tell. Many people reckon he may help to decode an ancient message in the future.”
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