L’etimo di Silvia

DANIELE MAGGI THE ETYMOLOGY OF SILVIA Leopardi approaches again and again, in his Zibaldone, the question about the historical relationship between Latin s° and Greek harsh spirit. He maintains, at the beginning, the antiquity of the Greek forms, but, almost suddenly, in January the 5th, 1822, he reaches the correct conclu- sion, that is, the priority of s°. This conclusion is attained thanks to a con- sideration of the examples he found in an article by Alexander Hamilton, partially translated in an Italian revue (in possession of Leopardi’s house), which supplied a series of lexical correspondences between Sanskrit and other languages in the perspective of a pioneering “Indo-European” linguis- tics. Going on autonomously, Leopardi observes the agreement between Latin and Sanskrit (e.g. Lat. septem ~ Skt. sapta) against the corresponding Greek form (e.g. ἑπτά – the latter not supplied by Hamilton) and, on the grounds of the application (for the first time in the Indo-European linguis- tics!), of the «rule of lateral areas», inferred a s° prior to Greek harsh spirit. An example, in this connection (dear to Leopardi even before this discovery), was Gr. ὕλη ~ Lat. silva: now, it is the s° in silva the demon- strably primeval one – that sound so many repeated, in a lot of alliterations, later on, in the verses of A Silvia.