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Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro was a SpanishJesuit andphilologist; born atHorcajo, 1 May 1735; died atRome, 24 August 1809. He is one of the most important authors, together withJuan Andrés, Antonio Eximeno orCelestino Mutis, of theSpanish Universalist School of the 18th century.
Having entered the Jesuit order atMadrid, he studied atAlcalá de Henares, devoting himself with special zeal toarchitecture andlinguistics. For a time he taught at the royal seminary in Madrid and at the Jesuit college ofMurcia; then he went to theAmericas as a missionary and remained there until 1767, when in connection with the abolition of the Jesuits the establishments of the Society were taken away from the order. Hervás now returned toEurope, taking up residence first at Cesena,Italy, then in 1784 atRome. In 1799 he went back to his native land, but four years later left Spain and lived in Rome for the remainder of his life. He was held in high honour;Pope Pius VII made him prefect of the Quirinal library, and he was a member of several learned academies. In Italy he had a chance to meet many Jesuits who had flocked thither from all parts of the world after the suppression of the order. He availed himself diligently of the exceptional opportunity thus afforded him of gaining information about remote and unknown idioms that could not be studied from literary remains. The results of his studies he laid down in a number of works, first in Italian, and subsequently translated into Spanish.
The greatest work of Hervás is the huge, Italian treatise on cosmography,Idea dell' Universo ("Idea of the Universe") (Cesena, 1778–87, in 21 vols. in 4to). It consists of several parts, almost all of which were translated into Spanish and appeared as separate works.
Of these the most important, which had appeared separately in Spanish in 1784, is entitledCatálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeración división y clase de éstas según la diversidad de sus idiomas y dialectos ("Catalog of the languages of the known nations, with a class division and numbering according to the diversity of its languages and dialects") (Madrid, 1800-5 6 vols.). Here Hervás attempts to investigate the origin and ethnological relationship of different nations on the basis of language. The main object of the book, therefore, is not really philological.
Volume I covers American races and idioms, volume II those of the islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans; the remaining volumes, devoted to the European languages, are inferior in value to the first two. The American dialects are certainly better described and classified than they had been before; the existence of aMalay andPolynesian speech family is established. For determining affinity in languages similarity in grammar is emphasized as against mere resemblance in vocabulary. While there were gross errors and defects in the work, it is conceded that it presented its materials with scholarly accuracy and thus proved useful to later investigators.
Other parts of the work to appear separately in Italian and later in Spanish were:
Hervás wrote a number of educational works for the deaf, the most notable beingLa Escuela Española de Sordo-mudos ó Arte para enseñarles á escribir y hablar el idioma español ("The Spanish School of Art for Deaf-mutes, or the Art of teaching to write and speak the Spanish language") (Madrid, 1795). He also produced a number of controversial or theological tracts.
Other miscellaneous works by Hervás include:
Somelenguas matrices (language families) listed by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro are:[1][2][3]
