Della illustrazione delle lingue antiche e moderne e principalmente dell'italiana

This extensive treatise sets out to illuminate the development of ancient tongues and the modern languages that descend from them, with a special focus on Italian. Drawing on manuscript catalogues, literary histories and bibliographic studies, the author gathers every resource that can shed light on how languages evolve and intersect. The opening pages explain the difficulty of such a project and argue that a broader definition of “illustration” is needed when direct evidence is scarce.

The work proceeds by examining striking resemblances among language families—shared noun endings, verb conjugations, and syntactic patterns—to trace possible lines of descent and migration. Brief surveys of Hebrew and its sister languages, as well as plans to link Greek, Latin, and the Romance tongues, illustrate the comparative method in action. Readers will find a scholarly yet readable exploration that invites deeper curiosity about the hidden connections between the words we speak today.