ASCOLI, GRAZIADIO ISAIA. - Glottologist, b. in 1829 at Gorizia, d. at Milan in 1907. A singular example of a self-taught man, during his youth he amassed an extremely vast knowledge of languages; called in 1861 to the chair of linguistics at the University of Milan through the happy intuition of Mamiani, he held it, honored with every kind of recognition, until his death.
The field of his glottological studies, at first extremely vast, came to be limited, around 1870, to the Indo-European stock, and then more particularly to Romance linguistics, and, in relation to this, to Celtic: Romance glottology having been founded by Diez, A. founded its dialectology. In the preface of the Archivio glottologico italiano founded by him, and where from 1873 he went on publishing his writings, he intervened, with his best-known work, in the question of the language. 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, drawing near in certain respects to Carducci, the duty of admitting the elements that the centuries-old culture of the entire nation had brought into the literary language. With happy intuition he affirmed that the concept of language ought to have a relation with that of art rather than with that of unity, and that correct expression had an almost miraculous character. Worthy of remembrance is the influence that the Jewish race and religion, which he felt vividly, had on the science cultivated by A., even though apparently alien to it: he attempted to unify the Semitic languages with the Indo-European ones in order thereby to strengthen the spiritual equalization of the two races. Among his works we recall the Studi critici (1861), the Glossario celtico and the Saggi ladini: many works, of very ample bulk, he left unfinished.
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Marcello Aurigemma