Fuentes y relaciones rusas en la obra de Juan Andrés y Lorenzo Hervás

Abstract

The two creations of Letters and Sciences and Universal Linguistics developed by the main figures of the Hispanic Age of Enlightenment and the Spanish Universalist School of the eighteenth century, Juan Andrés and Lorenzo Hervás respectively, integrate rigorously in the context of European and world culture the progress of Slavonic and Russian culture in different branches of knowledge, thus initiating the European and Spanish Slavonic Studies. At the same time that Andrés builds his encyclopedic World and Comparative Literature, in the field of Comparative Linguistics two simultaneous and parallel projects arise: Italian-Spanish and Russian. Catalog of Languages of Hervás has a historic- cultural, anthropological, ethnological character. Hervás offers from a scientific and symbolic-Christian thought a system and performs a genealogical classification of the languages of the world, elaborates the grammars in different languages and relates language with thought and history. The multilingual Vocabulary of Pallas, which responds to the interests and political ambitions of the Russian Empress, offers a taxonomic list of 273 words in more than 200 languages, being a useful, but impractical work because it is difficult to consult for scholars who do not know the Cyrillic characters and do not offer any kind of general reflections on those languages. The linguistic work of Hervás is the essential key for the modern development of Comparative Linguistics of the 19th century.