Francesco Soave, Riflessioni intorno all’istituzione d’una lingua universale
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abstract
Francesco Soave, one of the most important proponents of Italian Sensualism, is known especially for his pedagogical activity and didactic essays, such as the renowned Gramatica ragionata della lingua italiana (1771). The aim of this edition is to analyse and give light to a text of Soave’s work which is not usually considered. Indeed, he contributed to a very prosperous debate of the seventeenth century about the invention of a perfect and universal language by writing the essay Riflessioni intorno all’istituzione d’una lingua universale, in which he tried to create a perfect language and, at the same time, criticised its complexity and the impossibility of its global adoption. The first part of this work explains the different definitions of constructed languages; the second section describes Soave’s life and, in the end, the third and most important chapter analyses the whole text.