ASCOLI, GRAZIADIO ISAIA. – Glottologist, born in 1829 at Gorizia, died in Milan in 1907. A singular example of a self-taught scholar, he amassed, during his youth, a vast knowledge of languages; called in 1861 to the chair of linguistics at the University of Milan through Mamiani’s happy intuition, he held it, honored with every kind of recognition, until his death.
The field of his glottological studies, at first extremely broad, came around 1870 to be restricted to the Indo-European family, and then more particularly to Romance linguistics and, in connection with this, to Celtic: Romance glottology having been founded by Diez, A. founded its dialectology. In the proem to the Archivio glottologico italiano, which he founded and in which he began publishing his writings in 1873, he intervened, with his best-known work, in the language question. Against Manzoni and the Manzonians, who prescribed the use of the living Florentine language, A., while recognizing as a glottologist the Neo-Latin purity of Tuscan, affirmed, in certain respects drawing closer to Carducci, the duty to admit into the literary language the elements that the centuries-old culture of the entire nation had brought into II. With happy intuition he maintained that the concept of language ought to be related to that of art rather than to that of unity, and that correct expression had an almost miraculous character. The influence deserves mention that race and the Jewish religion, which he keenly felt, exerted upon the science cultivated by A., though apparently unrelated to them: he attempted to unify the Semitic languages with the Indo-European languages, thereby reinforcing the spiritual equalization of the two races. Among his works we may recall
the Studi critici (1861), the Glossario celtico and the Suggi ladini: he left many works, of very considerable scope, unfinished.