This quote really belongs on my Descriptive Quotations page ... except that no–one really knows who the polyglot was.
In fact, no–one really knows who said it (or wrote it) first.
The earliest attribution found by the Quote Investigator (QI) dates from 1931, when a Chicago Tribune columnist named Richard Henry Little wrote about a poet and former child prodigy named Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr: "... it was proudly proclaimed that Winifred could speak twelve languages. But apparently Winifred never learned to say No in any of them and hiked up to the altar as fast as anybody suggested the idea."
(Note that the implication is somewhat less salacious than that normally inferred nowadays.)
Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.'s most famous lines are "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue / And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me." These are the opening lines to The History of The U.S.
The first known attribution to Dorothy Parker appeared two years later, in 1933, when "the famed New Yorker magazine commentator Alexander Woollcott" wrote a profile of Dorothy Parker, entitled Our Mrs. Parker, for a periodical called Hearst's International–Cosmopolitan. Woollcott wrote: '"I was so terribly glad to see you," she murmurs to a departing guest. "Do let me call you up sometime, won't you, please?" And adds, when this dear chum is out of hearing, "That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them."'
"Jumping forward several decades to 2003," (the QI continues), "the film critic Gene Shalit presents a version of the joke in the Great Hollywood Wit that implies a film star known for her exotic appearance was the target of Parker's barb: 'Merle Oberon speaks eighteen languages and can't say no in any of them.'"
Several later sources name Merle Oberon as the target of Dorothy Parker's wit. But there appears to be little solid evidence that this was actually the case. The QI seems to conclude that Dorothy Parker may have come across Richard Henry Little's piece about Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr., and adapted it to fit a more "ribald" purpose. But other than the Merle Oberon suggestion, he has nothing to say about her likely target.
© Haydn Thompson 2021