The Primal Ideas of Mankind of Petar Stanković

Abstract

The authors of this paper present a hitherto unpublished text ofPetar Stanković, titled Idee primitive dell’Uomo in istato di natura pressotutti i popoli del mondo per conoscere i rapporti delle lingue e loro origine,which serves as a treatise or supplement to his brief, annexed sixteenlanguagedictionary. Because the philological work of Petar Stankovićis less known, this paper contributes to its research and also to a betterknowledge of Croatian lexicography in relation to European lexicographyand the general lexicographic tendencies of that time. The introductory partof the paper offers a brief overview of the life and work of Petar Stankovićand a concise description of the contents of the text, while the centralpart of the paper contains Stanković’s text in Italian, which he includesas someone who has experience in exploring the similarities betweenlanguages and questioning the problem of the empirical origin of languageand its connection with objects in the material world. Stanković, in usingthe comparative method is in keeping with contemporary Indo-Europeanresearch. The authors conclude that this treatise should be viewed togetherwith the dictionary as a whole, and placed in the context of languageresearch as a phenomenon, philosophical traditions of the relationship oflanguage and ideas, and especially in the context of linguistic and classicalphilological research in future research.