Graziadio Isaia Ascoli

Graziadio Ascoli
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli.
Born	16 July 1829 (1829-07-16) Gorizia, Austrian Empire
Died	21 January 1907 (1907-01-22) (aged 77) Milan, Kingdom of Italy
Occupation	Linguist

Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (16 July 1829 – 21 January 1907) was an Italianlinguist.

Ascoli was born in an Italian-speaking Jewish family in the multiethnic town of Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire (now in Italy). Already as a boy, he learned some of the other languages traditionally spoken in the town, German, Friulian, Slovene and Venetian.

An autodidact, he published his first important work on the languages of the orient in 1854. In 1860, he was appointed professor of linguistics at the Accademia scientifico-letteraria in Milan and introduced the study of comparative philology, Romance studies, and Sanskrit.

He made an important contribution to the study of the relationship between Indo-European and Semitic and was pioneer in the fields of Romani language and Celtic languages.

In Italy, he is above all known for his studies of Italian dialects, which he was first to classify systematically. In the Italian language question (questione della lingua), he did not accept a standard language based on the Florentine dialect as proposed by Alessandro Manzoni, but argued for a levelling of the dialects.