Alfredo Trombetti

Italian linguist

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Spanish. (December 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the Spanish article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 5,027 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Spanish Wikipedia article at [[:es:Alfredo Trombetti]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|es|Alfredo Trombetti}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Alfredo Trombetti
Portrait of Alfredo Trombetti
Born	16 January 1866 Bologna, Italy
Died	5 July 1929 Venice, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Occupation	Linguist

Academic work
Institutions	University of Bologna
Main interests	Comparative linguistics
Notable ideas	Monogenesis

Alfredo Trombetti (16 January 1866, in Bologna – 5 July 1929, in Venice), was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century.

Career overview

Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy.

He is best known as an advocate of the doctrine of monogenesis, according to which all of the world's languages go back to a single common ancestral language. His arguments for monogenesis were first presented in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905.^[1] This doctrine is still extremely controversial.

Proposed etymologies

A selection of Trombetti's proposed global etymologies:^[1]

Meaning	Root
to hear; ear	kul (kur)
water	ma; wad (wad, wed, wod), ud
dog	ku (ku-ari, ku-ri, etc.)
hair	tuk, suk
behind, back	kata, taka
foot	ganga; pat
earth (clay, ash)	tu
dust	twar, tur (< tu 'earth')
woman	na (nai)
man (person)	ku, etc.
man (male)	mar
egg (testicle)	umu (mu-n, mu-r, etc.)

Selected works

1902-1903. "Delle relazioni delle lingue caucasiche con le lingue camitosemitiche e con altri gruppi linguistichi. Lettera al professore H. Schuchardt." In Giornale della Società asiatica italiana, T. 15, pp. 177–201 and T. 16, pp. 145–175. Florence.
1902. Nessi genealogici fra le lingue del mondo antîco, 4 volumes, unpublished. Recipient of the Royal Prize of the Italian Academy in 1902.
1905. L'unità d'origine del linguaggio. Bologna: Luigi Beltrami.
1907. Come si fa la critica di un libro. Con nuovi contributi alla dottrina della monogenesi del linguaggio e alla glottologia generale comparata. Bologna: Luigi Beltrami.
1908. Saggi di glottologia generale comparata I. I pronomi personali. Accademia delle scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. Classe de scienze morali. Bologna.
1912. Manuale dell'arabo parlato a Tripoli. Grammatica, letture e vocabolario. Bologna: Luigi Beltrami.
1913. Saggi di glottologia generale comparata II. I numerali. Accademia delle scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. Classe de scienze morali. Bologna.
1920. Saggi di glottologia generale comparata III. Comparazioni lessicali. Accademia delle scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna. Classe de scienze morali. Bologna.
1922-1923. Elementi di glottologia, 2 volumes. Bologna: Zanichelli.
1925. Le origini della lingua basca. Bologna: Azzoguidi.
1927. "La lingua etrusca e le lingue preindoeuropee del Meditarreneo." In Studi etruschi, T. 1. Florence.
1928. La lingua etrusca. Florence: Rinascimento del libro.
1928. "Origine asiatica delle lingue e popolazioni americane." In Atti del 22 congresso internazionale degli americanisti, Roma, Settembre 1926, T. 1, pp. 169–246. Rome: Istituto Cristoforo Colombo.
1929. Il nostro dialetto bolognese. Bologna: Zanichelli.