 He managed, with the help of his brother Alexander initially, to acquire what was probably the largest collection of linguistic materials in Europe for his time. There was in effect no language group on the globe that did not attract his attention. Among the European and Indo-European languages Humboldt knew and studied classical Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, all of the Romance languages, English, Basque, Old Icelandic, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Armenian but also Hungarian. He was familiar with Hebrew, Arabic and Coptic (of which he wrote a grammar). From among the Asian languages he studied Chinese, Japanese, Siamese and Tamil. Yet in the center of his work stood, besides Basque (he is considered the founder of Basque Studies), the native languages of South, Central and North America, and increasingly from 1827–28 the languages of the Pacific from the East Coast of Africa to Hawai‘i and the South Sea Islands. These form what we call today the Austronesian language group whose existence Humboldt was the first to demonstrate conclusively. Among the papers in his remains we find studies, notes, analyses, observations and materials relating to well over two hundred languages. In his private and public life he mastered and used (besides his native German) French, English, Italian and Spanish.