Lorenzo Hervás

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File:Angelica Kauffmann - Lorenzo Hervás.jpg
Lorenzo Hervas (1794), by Angelica Kauffmann

Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro SJ (1 May 1735 – 24 August 1809) was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and philologist, a noted pioneer of comparative linguistics.[1] Alongside Juan Andrés, Antonio Eximeno or Celestino Mutis, he is one of the major names of the Spanish Universalist School.[2]

Biography

Lorenzo Hervás was born at Horcajo de Santiago in the Province of Cuenca, the son Juan García Hervás and Inés Panduro, farmers of modest means. He was the third and last of their children. He entered the Society of Jesus in Madrid on 29 September 1749 and studied philosophy and theology for seven years at the University of Alcalá, as well as canons and, especially, mathematics and astronomy, the latter sciences in which he showed great aptitude. In 1760 he was ordained a priest. After two years as a missionary in the bishopric of Cuenca, he moved to Cáceres, where he taught Latin at the Jesuit college. In 1761 he resided in Madrid and taught metaphysics at the Seminary of nobles, which he went on to direct in 1762. Two years later he was assigned to teach philosophy at the Anunciata College in Murcia. According to Fermín Caballero's biography of Hervás y Panduro, Abbé Hervás was never in America.[3]

After the Jesuits were expelled by Charles III in 1767, he went to Corsica and then to Italy, settling in Forlì, where he lived until 1773 with other Jesuits of the order ecclesiastical province of Toledo, devoted to the research and study of mathematics, astronomy, natural sciences and linguistics. His contact with Jesuits all over the world enabled him to compile information on all kinds of languages. He then went to Cesena, where the Marquis of Chini offered him hospitality as preceptor to his sons. There he undertook his masterpiece, the encyclopaedia Idea dell'Universo (1778–1792), divided into eleven tomes spread over 21 volumes. Although written in Italian, he translated it into Spanish and printed it in Spain.[lower-alpha 1]

After eleven years in Romagna, he went to Rome to consult the bibliography of the Vatican Library. He published Origine, formazione, mecanismo ed armonia degl' Idiomi (1785), Vocabolario poliglotto, con prolegomeni sopra più de CL lingue (1787), Saggio practicco delle Lingue con prolegomeni e una raccolta di orazioni dominicali in più di trecento lingue e dialetti (1787). In Rome he came into contact with the School for Deaf-Mutes of Tommaso Silvestri (who died in 1789) and Camillo Mariani, who explained the educational method that Abbé L'Epée had previously developed at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Hervás learned their methods, which he would later disseminate in Spanish. He was appointed theological adviser to Cardinal Albani in 1798 and canonist to Cardinal Reverella.

He returned to Spain in 1798, taking advantage of a decree of Charles IV that allowed Jesuits to return to Spain individually, and resided for some time in Barcelona; there he collaborated with Juan Albert Martí in the foundation and establishment of the Municipal School for the Deaf and Dumb (1800); He also took the opportunity to research in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and in the Archive of the Order of Santiago in Uclés, as a result of which he printed a Description of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, existing in the city of Barcelona and news of the general archive of the military Order of Santiago in its convent of Uclés, a pamphlet composed of two booklets and published in Cartagena in 1801; the same year and in the same place he printed a Preeminences and dignity that in the military Order of Santiago have their ecclesiastical prior and their mother house. He visited the nearby ruins of Cabeza del Griego which, in the midst of great controversy, he identified with the ancient Roman Segobriga. He then rested for a time in his native town; however, the decree was revoked and he was again banished to Italy in 1802; he took up residence in Rome, and there Pope Pius VII appointed him prefect of the library of the Quirinal Palace in 1804.

In 1805 he was made an emeritus member of the Sociedad Económica Vascongada; he was also a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Antiquities of Dublin and of the Etruscan Academy of Crotone. He translated the History of the Church by Abbot Bérault-Bercastel (1797–1808). In Rome he worked tirelessly to put his writings in order until his death surprised him on 24 August 1809 at the age of 74.

Works

Lorenzo Hervás, the author of a very extensive oeuvre, also has a large secondary bibliography, but still with scattered profiles. He wrote about 90 volumes. In Italian, De'vantaggi e svantaggi dello stato temporale di Cesena (1776), which deals with the advantages and disadvantages of the temporary state of Cesena. His fundamental work is a sort of encyclopaedia written in Italian, the Idea dell'Universo (1778–1792). The work is divided into eleven tomes in 21 volumes and three parts: History of the Life of Man (eight volumes), Cosmographical Elements (eight volumes) and, above all, Language (five volumes). This last part was the one that made him most famous. It contains a catalogue and study of hundreds of languages, such as had never been done before, many of them exotic, incorporating an extensive bibliographical account of the authors who wrote grammars and dictionaries in various languages. Using this last part, he would later write, in Spanish, his final Spanish version with the title Catálogo de las Lenguas (1800–1805), to which he added new data, the result of his experience on the subject, since 18 years elapsed between the publication of both works. In 1792 he published an "Appendix", volume 22, entitled Analisi filosofico-teologica della natura della carita (1792) (Philosophical-theological analysis of charity, that is, of the love of God). At this time he also published Virilità dell' Uomo ("Virility of Man," in four volumes, 1779–80); Vecchiaja e morte dell' Uomo ("Ageing and Death of Man," 1780). Viaggio estatico al Mondo planetario ("Static Journey to the Planetary World", 1780, of which he later made a revised version in Spanish); Storia della Terra ("History of the Earth", 1781–83, in six volumes).[5]

In 1789 he began a better structured Spanish edition of his encyclopaedia (his works written in Spanish were not simply translations of those published in Italian, but new works, some of them based on the previous ones, but notably improved and expanded and with new chapters). He divided the encyclopaedia into four independent works: Historia de la vida del hombre (1789–1799, seven volumes), Viaje estático al mundo planetario (1793–1794), four volumes, a treatise on astronomy in which he makes known Herschel's latest discoveries; El hombre físico is a work based on surgical, anatomical and physiological knowledge of the human body, and Catálogo de las lenguas. He also investigated the linguistics of the sign languages of deaf people, and to this end he wrote a Spanish School for deaf-mutes or art to teach them to write and speak the Spanish language (1795, two volumes) and a Catechism of Christian doctrine for the instruction of deaf-mutes. Several of his manuscript works are also preserved in the National Library in Madrid: Historia del arte de escribir, two volumes, Paleografía universal and Gramática de la lengua italiana. In the Jesuit archives there are others: Biblioteca jesuítico-española de escritores que han florecido por cinco lustros, two volumes; Gramáticas de veinticinco lenguas; Vocabularios de otras lenguas and a Disertación sobre el órigen, formación y calidad de la escritura china Ético-política de Confucio, El hombre vuelto a la Religión, Historia de las primeras colonias de América, among many other unpublished works.

Concerned about the French Revolution, he set out his own views in the essay Causas de la Revolución de Francia en el año 1789, y otros medios de que se han valido para efectuarla los enemigos de la religión y del Estado (1807; circulating in manuscript from around 1795). For this work, among others, he is considered one of the main representatives of counter-revolutionary thought in Spain.[6] His work is completed by the Descripcion del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, La primitiva población de América y explicación de insignes pinturas mejicanas and the invaluable Catálogo de manuscritos españoles y portugueses en Roma.

Lorenzo Hervás composed a catechism for deaf people (whom he came to call prelocutives and who were previously simply called "mute") and another for the schools of Horcajo de Santiago. The memory of his childhood and what he saw in Horcajo on his return from exile made him express the idea that children should be encouraged to receive a weekly allowance, so that earning a living would not be an obstacle to going to school. Attentive to the problems of education,[7] he proposed a better education for women in moral and civil matters, as well as in science, a courageous statement at a time when access to education was practically forbidden to women. In general, he also advocated a more equitable distribution of wealth and a fairer proportionality of wages in order to achieve greater well-being for the workers.

Apart from his important Escuela española de Sordomudos (1795),[8] in which he reveals his penetrating ability as a theorist of language and makes him the master of a discipline that is basically of Hispanic creation, as Juan Andrés had noted just before (1793), Hervás is above all one of the founders of linguistic science. The Catálogo de las Lenguas de las naciones conocidas y enumeración, división y clases de estas según la diversidad de sus idiomas y dialectos (1800–1805, six volumes), is a reworking of the earlier Italian version Catalogo delle Lingüe published in Cesena. According to Menéndez Pelayo, the Catálogo de las lenguas should be considered as a work different from the Italian one and preferable to it.[9] This is true at least in general terms. In Antonio Tovar's opinion, Hervás is the shining example of the merits of a precursor, since the discovery of historical and comparative linguistics "has been prepared by his ideas and works".[10]

In the volume devoted, in the Italian version, to the Vocabulario Poliglotto, a lexicon of sixty-three words translated into more than one hundred and fifty languages is compiled. This progression was already unusual at the time. The Catálogo de las Lenguas offers translations of the Lord's Prayer into three hundred languages and dialects, including a great many indigenous Spanish-American languages, and constructs the grammar of more than forty of them. The multiple translations of the Lord's Prayer enabled Hervás to draw "conclusions about the grammatical structure of most languages",[lower-alpha 2] and the work is thus far superior to all preceding works in vision and depth, including, of course, the famous elaborations of Peter Simon Pallas and the Mithridates of Vater and Adelung. The Humboldt brothers basically took advantage of Hervás' materials with very little thanks, as Max Müller pointed out as early as 1861 in the field of linguistics: Hervás gave Wilhelm von Humboldt the manuscript of the Gramáticas abreviadas de las dieciocho lenguas principales de América, a work which Vater and Adelung took advantage of. Between concealment and recognition, it is a fact that Hervás has been considered by many, and has perhaps gone down in the history of non-Anglo-Saxon linguistics, as the father of comparative linguistics. Hervás agreed with Humboldt that language was also a vision of the world and of reality:

Languages are not only codes of speech, but also methods of speaking and thinking.

According to Coșeriu, Hervás' linguistic conception should be studied in detail in relation to his concepts of "grammatical artifice", substratum, language structure, arbitrariness of the sign, language/history relationship, his contributions to Romance and Hispanic linguistics and to the study of certain particular languages, as well as his probable influence on Wilhelm von Humboldt with regard to "structural analysis through literal translation" and "the idea of the constancy and stability of linguistic systems".[11]

Twenty-five years before Franz Bopp scientifically proved the existence of the Indo-European family, he established for the first time in Europe the relationship between Greek and Sanskrit. Against the French linguists, he proved that Hebrew was neither the language of Paradise nor the original language; he definitively established its kinship with other Semitic languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic and Syriac. He upheld the theory of Basque-Iberianism and proved it with scientific procedures. He established two new language families, Malayo-Polynesian and Finno-Ugric. His greatest claim to fame is that he was praised by linguists of the stature of Otto Jespersen and W. von Humboldt. He was the first to recognise the superior importance of grammar and morphology in deciding the kinship of languages, in which he followed Leibniz's ideas. For him, the most persistent aspect of a language is not its vocabulary, but its grammatical and phonetic structure. Until then it was the lexicon that was compared, as did the Pallas compilers and the Adelung-Vaten comparatists. As a man of universal vision, he did not limit himself to the narrow framework of European languages, which Scaliger had already done to some extent, but embraced languages from all over the world; for this purpose he collected data directly or through missionaries, who gave him valuable help with regard to American and Insulindian languages.

It should be borne in mind that Hervás' purpose is in principle anthropological in nature, the linguistic procedure and in general even his study of languages being a way to establish ethnic families. In fact, this is the purpose of much of his most important research and the reason why he has to be considered one of the creators of modern Ethnology and even Anthropology, just like Antonio Eximeno in relation to Musicology. Lorenzo Hervás, the main founder of Comparative Linguistics, is consequently one of the initiators of modern comparatism or Comparatística, together with the Spanish Jesuits Juan Andrés and Antonio Eximeno, that is to say the Spanish Universalist School of the 18th century.

See also

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ According to the biographical compendium compiled by Antonio Astorgano Abajo.[4]
  2. ↑ See the foreword by Jesús Bustamente to Tovar's work.[10]

Citations

  1. ↑ Amor Ruibal, Ángel (1904). Los problemas fundamentales de la Filología Comparada. Madrid: Fernando Fe.
  2. ↑ Aullón de Haro (2016).
  3. ↑ Moreno Iturralde, José Ignacio (1992). Hervás y Panduro, ilustrado español. Cuenca: Diputación Provincial.
  4. ↑ Astorgano Abajo (2010).
  5. ↑ Batllori, Miguel (1966). La cultura hispano-italiana de los Jesuitas expulsos. Madrid: Gredos, pp- 201–73.
  6. ↑ Herrero, Javier (1988). Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español. Madrid: Alianza, pp. 153–59.
  7. ↑ Aullón de Haro, Pedro; Davide Mombelli (2020). Introduction to the Spanish Universalist School. Leiden: Brill.
  8. ↑ Fraser, Benjamin (2010). "Spain, 1795: Reconsidering Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809) and the Visual Language of the Deaf," Dieciocho: Hispanic enlightenment, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, pp. 259–78.
  9. ↑ Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino (1942). Estudios y discursos de crítica histórica y literaria. Madrid: CSIC, p. 46.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Tovar, Antonio (1987). El lingüista español Lorenzo Hervás. Madrid: SGEL, p. 21.
  11. ↑ Coșeriu, Eugenio (1978). "Lo que se dice de Hervás." In: Estudios ofrecidos a Alarcos Llorach III. Universidad de Oviedo, pp. 35–58.

References

Adelung, Friedrich von (1801). "Nachricht von den Werken des spanischen Exjesuiten Don Lorenzo Hervás über die Sprachen," Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden, Vol. VIII, pp. 543–54.
Alonso-Cortés, Ángel (2000). "Lorenzo Hervás y la lengua vasca," Fontes linguae vasconum: Studia et documenta, Año 32, No. 84, pp. 265–72.
Armenteros, Carolina (2021). "Eclectic, Conservative, Cosmopolitan: The Linguistics and Anthropology of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1753-1809)." In: Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700‒1930). Leiden: Brill, pp. 67–85.
Astorgano Abajo, Antonio (2010). Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809). Toledo: Almud Ediciones.
Aullón de Haro, Pedro (2016). La Escuela Universalista Española del siglo XVIII. Madrid: Sequitur.
Batllori, Miguel (1999). Lingüística i etnologia al segle XVIII: Lorenzo Hervás. Valencia: Tres i Quatre.
Battaner Moro, Elena (2019). "El concepto de lenguaje en la obra de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809)." In: Estudios lingüísticos en homenaje a Emilio Ridruejo. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, pp. 71–82.
Beltrán y Rózpide, Ricardo (1928). "El Catálogo de las Lenguas," Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, Vol. XCIII, pp. 68–136.
Delgado León, Feliciano (2003). Lorenzo Hervás. Sus ideas lingüísticas. Córdoba: Tipografía Sur.
Fuertes Gutiérrez, Mara (2013). "The languages of the Philippines in the works of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809)," Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura, No. 19, pp. 76–89.
García de Paredes Aued, Gustavo (1964). El pensamiento de don Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro: Su significación en las ciencias del espíritu. Madrid: Artes Gráficas Map.
García-Medall, Joaquín (2017). "Lorenzo Hervás y el desarrollo de la Lingüística moderna." In: Pedro Aullón de Haro & Jesús García Gabaldón, eds., Juan Andrés y la Escuela Universalista Española. Madrid: Ediciones Complutense, pp. 129–45.
García-Medall, Joaquín (2019a). "Sobre la Gramática de la Lengua Italiana (1797) de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro." In: Estudios lingüísticos en homenaje a Emilio Ridruejo. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, pp. 551–64.
García-Medall, Joaquín (2019b). "Sobre la Historia del Arte de escribir (1805) de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, S. J.," Liceo franciscano, Año 69, No. 212, pp. 13–44.
Haßler, Gerda (2001). "Teoría lingüística y antropología en las obras de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro." In: Dietrich Briesemeister, Jan Lechner & Manfred Tietz, eds., Los jesuitas españoles expulsos. Su imagen y su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del siglo XVIII. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, pp. 379–99.
Hernán Perrone, Nicolás (2013). "'Si no eres jesuita serás jansenista; y si no eres jansenista serás jesuita': El problema del jansenismo en Causas de la revolución de Francia de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro S.J. (1735-1809)," Hispania sacra, Vol. LXV, No. Extra 2, pp. 203–30.
Rodríguez Domínguez, Sandalio (1995). "Psicología ilustrada de Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809)," Revista de historia de la psicología, Vol. XVI, No. 3/4, pp. 179–88.
Roura, Lluis (2001). "La Contre-Révolution en Espagne et la lutte contre la France, 1793-1795 et 1808-1814." In: La Contre-Révolution en Europe: XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Réalités politiques et sociales, résonances culturelles et idéologiques. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 205–19.
Sarmiento, Ramón (1990). "Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809). Entre la Tradición y la Modernidad." In: Hans-Josef Niederehe & E. F. K. Koerner, eds., History and Historiography of Linguistics: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, Vol. 2. 18th–20th Century. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 461–82.
Tagliavini, Carlo (1933). "Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo." In: Enciclopedia Italiana. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
Torres, Luis Fernández (2023). "Liberales vs Serviles: Symmetrization of Asymmetrical Counter-Concepts and Political Polarization in Spain and Portugal (1810–34)." In: Kirill Postoutenko, ed., Beyond “Hellenes” and “Barbarians”: Asymmetrical Concepts in European Discourse. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 124–48.
Zimmermann, Klaus (2001). "Los aportes de Hervás a la lingüística y su recepción por Humboldt." In: Dietrich Briesemeister, Jan Lechner & Manfred Tietz, eds., Los jesuitas españoles expulsos. Su imagen y su contribución al saber sobre el mundo hispánico en la Europa del siglo XVIII. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, pp. 647–68.
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