ASCOLI, GRAZIADIO ISAIA. - Linguist, born in 1829 in Gorizia, died in Milan in 1907. A singular example of an autodidact, he amassed, during his youth, an immense knowledge of languages; in 1861 he was called to the chair of linguistics at the University of Milan by the keen insight of Mamiani, and held it, honored with every kind of recognition, until his death.
The field of his linguistic studies, initially vast, came to be limited around 1870 to the Indo-European group, and then more particularly to Romance linguistics, and in relation to this, to Celtic: having been founded by Diez, Romance linguistics was further developed by Ascoli in its dialectology. In the preface to the Archivio glottologico italiano, which he founded and where he published his writings from 1873 onward, he intervened, with his most well-known work, in the question of language. Against Mamiani and the followers of Manzoni, who prescribed the use of the living Florentine language, Ascoli, while recognizing, as a linguist, the Neolatin purity of Tuscan, affirmed, approaching Carducci in certain respects, the duty to admit the elements that centuries of culture of the entire nation had contributed to the literary language. With keen insight, he affirmed that the concept of language ought to have a relationship with that of art rather than with that of unity, and that correct expression had a character almost of miracle. Worthy of note is the influence that the Jewish race and religion, which he felt deeply, had on the science seemingly unrelated cultivated by Ascoli: he attempted to unify the Semitic languages with the Indo-European ones in order to strengthen, through this path, 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 vast scope, he left unfinished.