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Charles Berlitz
Charles Berlitz (right) with Antonio Las Heras ("Pájaro de Fuego" magazine)
Born	November 20, 1914 (1914-11-20) New York City, USA
Died	December 18, 2003 (2003-12-19) Tamarac, Florida
Occupation	Linguist, author
Spouse(s)	Valerie Seary

Charles Frambach Berlitz (November 20, 1914 – December 18, 2003) was a linguist and language teacher^[1] known for his books on anomalous phenomena, as well as his language-learning courses. He is listed in People's Almanac as one of fifteen most eminent linguists in the world and was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize for non-fiction in 1976 for The Bermuda Triangle (1974), which sold over 20 million copies. He was a polyglot and spoke 32 languages.

Life

Berlitz was born in New York City. He was the grandson of Maximilien (Maximilian) Berlitz, who founded the Berlitz Language Schools. As a child, Charles was raised in a household in which (by his father's orders) every relative and servant spoke to Charles in a different language: he reached adolescence speaking eight languages fluently. In adulthood, he recalled having the childhood delusion that every human being spoke a different language, and wondering why he did not have his own language like everyone else in his household. His father spoke to him in German, his grandfather in Russian, his nanny in Spanish.

He began working for the family language school, The Berlitz School of Languages, during college breaks. The publishing house, of which he was vice president, sold, among other things, tourist phrase books and pocket dictionaries, several of which he authored. He also played a key role in developing record and tape language courses. He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after he sold the company to publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University.

Berlitz spent 13 years on active duty in the U.S. Army, mostly in intelligence. In 1950, he married Valerie Seary, with whom he had a daughter, Lynn. He died in 2003 at the age of 89 at University Hospital in Tamarac, Florida.

See also

• Berlitz International

Bibliography

Anomalous phenomena

• The Mystery of Atlantis {1969)
• Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (1972)
• The Bermuda Triangle (1974, ISBN 0-285-63326-0
• Without a Trace (1977)
• The Philadelphia Experiment - Project Invisibility (1979)
• The Roswell Incident (1980)
• Doomsday 1999 A.D. (1981) ISBN 0-586-05543-6.
• Atlantis - The Eight Continent (G. P. Putnams Sons., New York, 1984)
• Atlantis: the lost continent revealed, Macmillan, London, 1984
• The Lost Ship of Noah: In Search of the Ark at Ararat (1987)
• The Dragon's Triangle (1989)
• World of Strange Phenomena (Little Brown & Company, New York, 1995)

Language

• Native Tongues (1982)

References