SOURCE: Stancati, Claudia. “The French Sources of Leopardi's Linguistics.” In Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories, edited by Lia Formigari and Daniele Gambarara, pp. 129-39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995.

[In the following essay, Stancati examines the relationship of Leopardi's linguistic theory to his study of various thinkers of the French Enlightenment.]

Giacomo Leopardi's “rationally founded and demonstrated scepticism” (ZIB [Zibaldone]: 1653) draws its nourishment from still-vital elements of Enlightenment thought. This can be seen, for example, if we explore Leopardi's connection with Holbach (cf. Stancati 1979). But it is true in a more general way of his relationship with other French Enlightenment thinkers, also with regard to the question of a national language, the “questione della lingua”, which is an important aspect of Leopardi's political and cultural project. As Lo Piparo (1982) and Gensini (1984) have shown, Leopardi's materialist anthropology, based on the discovery of the “adaptive” nature of man, is tightly linked to his linguistic theory, which posits close, reciprocal relations between society, language and culture.

1. LEOPARDI'S USE OF HIS SOURCES

It is very hard to identify the sources of Leopardi's linguistics owing to his extraordinary ability to make highly significant contributions of his own to cultural issues, even when he took his cue from second-hand quotations encountered, perhaps, in minor authors (Gensini 1984:26). To be able to say anything definitive about the sources of Leopardi's linguistics, in fact, we would need to “make a thoroughgoing investigation of the materials stowed away in Leopardi's library” (Ibid.:29): for example, in order to trace the origins of Leopardi's remarks on Sanskrit or Chinese (cf. ZIB:929, 942, 950, 978, 982).

As regards his intuitive grasp of the cultural issues of his day and his ability to make his own syntheses of these, Leopardi himself writes:

Never having read metaphysical writers and being engaged in studies of quite a different nature, having learnt nothing of these matters in the schools (which I have never attended), I had already awoken to the falsity of innate ideas, guessed at the optimism of Leibniz, and discovered the principle that the progress of knowledge consists entirely in conceiving that one idea contains another, which is the summa of the whole of the new ideological science.

(ZIB:1347)

His claim never to have read metaphysical writers should of course be taken with a pinch of salt, since we know that Leopardi was a voracious reader—one engaged, moreover, in developing what he himself explicitly referred to as “his philosophical system” (ZIB:946-950, 1089-1090).

Although the only available catalogue of Leopardi's library is an old and incomplete one (CAT. 1899), we know that he had at his disposal texts of all kinds, including many of the most challenging works of Enlightenment culture, such as the Lettre de Trasybule à Leucippe or the Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrétienne attributed to Fréret, or Holbach's Bon sens. There also exists a record of the poet's reading from 1823 to 1830 (cf. Binni, in Leopardi 1969:I. 373 ff.) in which the names of some of the authors I shall later be mentioning appear, as well as numerous Italian works specifically concerning the “questione della lingua” (Lollio, Salvini, Buonmattei).

Since the connection between Leopardi and the Idéologues has been fully explored by Gensini and since the poet's references to Constant, Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël are explicit and direct, I will dwell here only on the relationship between Leopardi and a number of exponents of the Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and D'Alembert) with a view to adding a little to the observations already made by Lo Piparo and Gensini.

2. DIDEROT AND D'ALEMBERT

Diderot is mentioned directly in the Zibaldone only as co-author of the Encyclopédie (ZIB:4299). We can perhaps detect an echo of Diderot in Leopardi's comparison between a baby and a dumb person (ZIB:1924, 2960): like a dumb person, a baby has the disposition for but not the faculty of speech. What Leopardi certainly did not share with Diderot was his view of the superiority of the French language: the poet's rejection of this view is one of the central issues in his linguistic enquiries.

Leopardi's links with D'Alembert are much easier to demonstrate since, in the above-mentioned list of works read, we find not only the latter's Discours préliminaire, but also his Observations sur l'art di traduire and Sur l'harmonie des langues. These are listed between 1827 and 1829 and cited in notes dated May 1829. However, the list of readings and the citations in the Zibaldone do not always coincide chronologically (for example, in the case of the Essai sur les éloges de Thomas which is listed as having been read in 1824 but is mentioned as early as August 1820).

D'Alembert's observations on the difficulty of translating are picked up more than once in the Zibaldone, as is his opinion that Italian is more suitable for translation thanks to its flexibility and that French is less easily translated because of the severity of its rules and the uniformity of its construction. Each language, in any case, D'Alembert concludes, has its particular “genius”, a view which Leopardi certainly shares.

It is impossible here to cite all the passages in which Leopardi discusses the harmony of languages and the connection between modern European languages and Latin and Greek. But there is no doubt that he agrees with some of D'Alembert's remarks on the impossibility of reconstructing the sounds of dead languages, whose true pronunciation is lost to us. In fact, Leopardi stresses that, as far as Latin is concerned, the most authentic pronunciation is more likely to be found in popular writings and verses than in learned works (ZIB:3344).

3. OTHER AUTHORS OF THE ENCYCLOPéDIE

It is certainly possible to find connections between Leopardi the linguist and the Encyclopédie if we bear in mind that the work of linguistics most often cited in the Zibaldone (no fewer than 17 times) is the Encyclopédie méthodique of Nicolas Beauzée who succeeded Dumarsais as author of the grammatical articles of the Encyclopédie and wrote, among other things, the article on Langue itself.

Leopardi did not of course share the linguistic rationalism of Beauzée and the other contributors to the Encyclopédie. But when he writes that “usage is acknowledged as the sovereign lord of speech (ZIB:1263), he is virtually translating the passage in Langue where Beauzée writes: “Tout est usage dans les langues […] l'usage n'est donc pas le tyran des langues, il en est le législateur naturel”, since “l'idée de tyrannie emporte chez nous celle d'une usurpation injuste”.

In the same article we find another observation which was to be picked up by Leopardi, namely that the old vernaculars are closer to Latin and Greek, and derive from these. Beauzée also incidentally criticises Rousseau for getting entangled in insoluble contradictions with regard to the connection between sociality, needs, and the origin of language. The circularity of Rousseau's approach is pointed out by Leopardi too:

We can thus apply to the alphabet what Rousseau said when he confessed that, in examining language and endeavouring to explain its invention, he was greatly embarrassed, since it did not seem possible for a language to be formed before a society had come to perfection, or for an almost perfect society to exist before it possessed a ready-formed and mature language.

(ZIB:2957)

We might add here that another thread links Leopardi with Beauzée and the encyclopedists, namely Girard's work on synonyms frequently cited in the Encyclopédie and explicitly mentioned by Leopardi (ZIB:367, 978, 994).

There is more than one resemblance between some of Leopardi's jottings and Turgot's article Etymologie. Leopardi, in fact, used etymological analyses as a kind of proving-ground for his ideas on language and proclaimed himself “a philologist enlightened by philosophy” (ZIB:1205), for whom etymology was one of the main tools of the archaeology of language. Leopardi thus might be seen as agreeing with the article Dictionnaire of the Encyclopédie where he would be able to read that the earliest words are the “philosophical roots” of a language.

4. VOLTAIRE

In the Zibaldone there are three direct mentions of Voltaire on language, together with an indirect one via a passage from Vincenzo Monti's Proposta di correzioni e aggiunte al vocabolario della crusca. The earliest is dated 17 June 1821 when Leopardi, discussing Chinese language and culture, cites Voltaire in order to stress the difference between words that “fall within the language of conversation”, and “technical words” which he calls terms, whose meaning is much more precise and definite (ZIB:1180). In another note Leopardi mentions a letter from Voltaire to Frederick II in order to turn upside down Voltaire's view that Latin is a much apter language than French for details and precision. For Leopardi French is a supremely “unnatural” language and hence extremely rich in minute terminology (ZIB:3633). There is also a brief note dated March 1824 in which Leopardi makes a reference to Voltaire on the universality of the French language (ZIB:4050).

5. MONTESQUIEU

Montesquieu is an important presence in the jottings that form the Zibaldone: he is cited with great frequency and on a variety of topics. It is worth recalling that the idea of investigating human phenomena as products of a web of relationships first appears in Enlightenment culture in the Esprit des lois and in the early writings of Montesquieu, with which Leopardi was certainly familiar. In one respect, Leopardi's linguistics may thus be seen as an enquiry into the relationship between languages and “the constitution, customs, climate, religion, commerce etc.” as the frontispiece of the Esprit des lois has it; an account of the connections between Leopardi and Montesquieu would also be useful for reconstructing Leopardi's political ideas.

In the Zibaldone Leopardi talks about the relations of necessity that govern the human world: “man will never be happy till he knows himself and the necessary relations that bind him to other beings” (ZIB:379). He had already noted earlier, citing Montesquieu's work on the Romans, that “the human world has become like the natural world; we need to study events as we study phenomena” (ZIB:119). It is hardly surprising, then, that when he mentions Madame de Staël (no doubt still with Montesquieu in mind), he sets up a new relationship between languages and climates (ZIB:200, 3247), a subject here turns to when he mentions “the infinite number of causes” which give rise to the diversity of languages.

Re-reading the Pensées of Montesquieu devoted to language, we come across a number of topics that will later turn up in Leopardi. For example, the antiquity of Hebrew, the prosodic differences between the various languages, the difficulty of accepting a foreigner's pronunciation of our own language; or again, a parallel drawn between Latin and French, a remark on the difficulty of translation, an attack on the academies for attempting to impose norms on languages (cf. Montesquieu, Pensées, in OC [Oeuvres complètes] II:1213 ff.). Moreover, the systematic parallel drawn by Montesquieu between five modern languages (French, English, Italian, German and Spanish), with the inclusion of Greek and Latin, seems to foreshadow Leopardi's project for a “parallelo delle 5 lingue”. Similarly, Montesquieu's brief notes on the origin of writing foreshadow Leopardi's observations on this topic and mention among other things the legend of the Phoenician origin of the alphabet.

6. ROUSSEAU

The relationship between Leopardi and Rousseau is a vast, controversial and complex matter. Leopardi seems to echo Rousseau continually when he deals with subjects like the relationship between nature and reason, barbarity and civilisation, individual and community, and their contradictions (see for instance ZIB:873-877).

I have already remarked that Leopardi was aware of the circularity of Rousseau's approach to the problem of the origin of language in the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, but we do not know whether he also knew the Essai sur l'origine des langues directly. This work of Rousseau's is mentioned only once in the Zibaldone (ZIB:2086) and then only at second-hand, via Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne, where the work from which the idea is derived is not mentioned explicitly. The passage in question draws a distinction between the “langues du Nord” and the “langues du Midi”: the former are seen as the daughters of necessity and the latter the daughters of joy. This contrast between North and South corresponds to that between the ancients and the moderns in Leopardi's notes on language (as a comparison with, for example, ZIB:932 and 1026 shows).

For Leopardi as for Rousseau, language “is the most essential feature of man, who is distinguished from animals by the organs of speech” (ZIB:1021); “la parole distingue l'homme entre les animaux: le langage distingue les nations entre elles” (Rousseau [1781] 1990:59). “La langue de convention n'appartient qu'à l'homme”, writes Rousseau. Leopardi maintains that “the faculty of speech comes from nature but the difference of sounds comes from the force of habit”, and that “speech is an art learned by men. The variety of languages is proof of this. Gesture is a natural thing taught by nature” (ZIB:65, 51, 141).

As regards the relationship between human and animal language Leopardi may owe something to Lamettrie's L'Homme machine, where he would read that the capacities of man and animals are the same but that man possesses many more signs and, above all, arbitrary signs. (We might recall here that Leopardi in his youth wrote a Dissertazione sopra l'anima delle bestie).

Another subject which Leopardi and Rousseau have in common is music; it is discussed in the second part of the Essai sur l'origine des langues and Leopardi touches on it on various occasions in the Zibaldone (ZIB:154, 178). It is worth noting in this context that Maupertuis, for example, considered music a kind of universal language like arithmetic. There are no traces of direct or indirect citations of Maupertuis by Leopardi, but a reading of La dissertation sur les différens moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leurs idées shows that they have a number of points in common, especially as regards the origin of the alphabet.

To return to Leopardi and Rousseau: each of them holds that languages lose their naturalness as they acquire greater clarity and precision, and that the earliest names are those designating objects (Rousseau [1781] 1990:73; ZIB:1356, 1202, 1448, 1388, 1205, 2383).

One difference needs to be recorded here, namely their concepts of synonyms. According to Leopardi primitive languages do not possess synonyms, whereas according to Rousseau they are rich in these. Both however believe that in ancient languages vowels predominated over consonants.

It could of course be argued that these topics are not peculiar to Rousseau, since they appear in most of the literature of the 18th century on the problem of the origin of languages. Yet, like both Rousseau and Vico, Leopardi highlights the imaginative function of language (see for example his rejection of languages that are too geometrical), even though he by no means underestimates language's logical, rational aspects.

7. LEOPARDI AND THE ORIGIN OF THE ALPHABET

Leopardi is less attracted by such typical 18th-century issues as the invention of language, the original tongue, and the quest for a new universal language (ZIB:3254, 4374). What seems to interest him more, on the other hand, is the origin of the alphabet. The transition from a spoken to a written language seems extremely important to him, since it is through the alphabet—and the invention of numbers—that we move from the phonetic to the semantic plane, in other words from the oral expression of primordial feelings and needs to the representation and communication of abstract, complex ideas. The more the alphabet is restricted and “stylised”, the further it moves from hieroglyphic and ideographic scripts, which are related to objects and not ideas, the more the powers of a language are enhanced and multiplied.

If conventionality is what characterises human language, the main medium of this convention is writing. It is at the point of transition from spoken language to written language that an authentic semantic revolution takes place: the transition from sound to writing. “Sound and structure are independent, so that it is possible to imagine two languages whose words have a common etymology but which are nonetheless very different tongues”, Leopardi writes (ZIB:965). “An infinity of results and combinations derives from the use of elements in writing and arithmetic” (ZIB:808). It is a sort of chemical combination: just as nature, drawing on a large though limited number of elements, mixes an infinite series of compounds, so language is able, through the graphic representation made possible by the alphabet, to make infinite use of finite means. What fascinates Leopardi is the transition to this second phase of language, and his wonder at the invention of the alphabet is expressed on various occasions, with possible echoes of Polybius: “a most abstruse and admirable invention if we reflect a moment on it, one which men have had to do without, not out of chance but out of necessity, for centuries upon centuries” (ZIB:940). This “miracle of the human spirit” was born of chance and, according to Leopardi, was the product of the genius of a single person, subsequently spreading throughout the world. In fact, peoples that “have had no commerce with any other literate nation have not had or do not have an alphabet” (ZIB:2620).

In a long passage dated 4 June 1823 Leopardi (ZIB:2948, 2960) returns to the idea that all alphabets derive from a single, Phoenician original (“I say that all or nearly all derive from a single one”), illustrating how some letters may have been introduced into our alphabet even if they were absent from Phoenician, Hebrew, other ancient oriental, and Latin alphabets. The “admirable thought” that gave rise to the alphabet consisted in

applying the signs of writing to the sounds of words, instead of applying them to things or ideas as was done in primitive writing and hieroglyphics and by the Mexicans in their picture-writing, and as is done by savages and the Chinese.

In ascribing the invention of the alphabet to the Phoenicians Leopardi is repeating an ancient legend which he may of course have come across in Lucan's Pharsalia or in Hobbes, but which is also mentioned in the articles “Ecriture” and “Encyclopédie” of the Encyclopédie, and by Warburton and Condillac, as well as by Rousseau in his Essai sur l'origine des langues. Leopardi may also have found in these texts the idea of an evolution from a pictorial to an ideographic to a linear alphabet. In another passage Leopardi writes

Since man can only think by speaking, it is through the medium of language that ideas are attached to words […] the alphabet is the language with which we conceive sounds and break down language into its simple elements until we are able to reassemble ideas by means of the elements of sound.

(ZIB:2949ff.)

Those who do not know the alphabet—children or the illiterate—cannot master those procedures of thought consisting in the analysis of elements into simpler ones and the synthesis of elements into more complex ones. The alphabet gives words wings and enables language to achieve that lightness which makes the understanding of the world accessible to man.

Leopardi returns to the invention of the alphabet—so essential for the “denaturalising” of man—in a comment dated 8 December 1823 referring to Algarotti's Saggio sugli Incas, which he had read that year (ZIB:3958). To Leopardi, the refined civilisations of the Incas and of China represent a typical example of how the lack of a linear alphabet can cripple a civilisation and culture, giving rise to a rift between the cultivated classes and the people (ZIB:942). A very similar thesis is expounded in Condorcet's Esquisse. These observations also appear in a long note dated October 1823, which begins with the story of the invention of fire, continues with the invention of navigation and language, and ends with the invention of writing. In the same passage Leopardi refers to the idea that there was a single, original human language, citing as evidence the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, as does Beauzée in his article “Langue” (ZIB:3669).

Leopardi also remarks on the lack of graphic representation of vowels in ancient oriental alphabets, in spite of the fact that vowels are widely used in the spoken languages. He notes that “the subtlety and spirituality” of these sounds defy the still rather limited and crude analytical capacities of these alphabets (ZIB:2402).

In discussing the origins of the great enterprise of language, Leopardi claims that we can uncover the ancient roots of languages by employing “the discernment and subtlety of the philosopher, and the vast erudition and skill of the philologist, archaeologist and polyglot” (ZIB:1263).

Leopardi frequently dwells on the “prodigious and most difficult [art] of writing” and on the changes that the use of a single alphabet brought about in the infinite variety of languages which had already developed, in however rough and ready a form. For writing, after a long process of refinement, succeeds in exalting the creative capacities of a language, encoding its sound, making conventions possible—conventions that can be shared by an ever-growing number of men.

In a passage dated 22 June 1821 Leopardi writes:

Words in themselves are mere sounds, yet, like languages as a whole, they are signs of ideas; they are able to signify these because men by mutual consent apply them to particular ideas, and recognise them as signs of these. In a fairly developed society the principal medium of this human convention is writing. Languages that entirely lack or are deficient in this medium […] remain either completely impotent, or extremely impoverished and weak […]. All these things are impossible without writing because there is no medium for a universal convention, and without this a language is not a language but mere sound. The living voice of each person does not carry far and carries to few others.

(ZIB:1202 ff.)

We may say, then, that convention rather than analyticalness is the key concept of the philosophy of language for Leopardi.

8. CONCLUSIONS

The dream of a general grammar that constitutes a universal logic, the idea of a new single, universal and natural language, the quest for the origin of language or the zero degree of the word—all these are alien to Leopardi in spite of the fact that his culture is deeply rooted in Enlightenment thought. Radically materialist and sensationalist, Leopardi shares above all with Enlightenment thought a descriptive, non-evaluative stance and a comparative approach to languages and cultures, while implicitly acknowledging the superiority of the ancients. Echoes of all the most important 18th-century investigations of language can be found in his works. What Leopardi lacks is the Enlightenment's idea of nature as the source of intelligibility, order, goodness, and universal, absolute values. Rather, he perceives nature as a tangle of insoluble contradictions which reason struggles to reduce to uniformity, but which cannot be resolved by new, consolatory mythologies. Such mythologies seem to him to be an attempt to reintroduce innate ideas, which have been overthrown “by Locke and by modern ideology” (ZIB:1616). This attitude of Leopardi's is confirmed in the opinions he frequently expresses about the idea of natural law as universal law, or about the French Revolution (ZIB:312, 160, 358, 725, 1180).

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