Gli studi linguistici di Carlo Cattaneo: il "Saggio di dizionario comparativo"

The article describes some of the writings on linguistics preserved in the Archivio Cattaneo at the Museo del Risorgimento in Milan. In particular, the essay focuses on a set of lexicographic index-cards dedicated to words of Germanic origin, true or supposed. Cattaneo likely worked on these cards in his twenties and thirties, as part of a book project dedicated to the influence of the Germanic invasions on the development of Italian language. Through an analysis of these index-cards (two of which are published at the end of the essay) the article describes notes and observations which constitute the basic core of Cattaneo’s ideas about the origin and development of human language, ideas to which Cattaneo will remain attached throughout his life and eventually schematize into a set of linguistics “laws”, during his time teaching at the secondary school at Lugano, in the 1850s and 60s.