Giorgio Raimondo Cardona : La lingua e la cultura

Giorgio Raimondo Cardona (1943 – 1988). After his university degree in 1965 with Walter Belardi, he became, in 1968, first assistant and then professor of glottology at the University of Rome; Then, from 1968 to 1980, he taught Armenian language and literature at the Oriental University Institute in Naples, and in 1980 he was appointed full professor of glottology at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, where he directed, from 1985 to 1988, the department of glottoanthropological studies, that he strongly desired and that marked a very fruitful and innovative research season, both for linguistics and anthropology, in the sign of the inter- weaving of the two disciplines. Also indicative of this turmoil is the fact that when he passed away in August 1988, Cardona’s bibliography counted more than two hundred titles: monographs, essays, articles, dictionaries, edited works and translations. The core intuition of Giorgio Cardona, that provided him with the opportunity to open up a research path challenging not only in itself, but especially because of the resistance and friction he encountered, both on the linguistic and on the anthropological side, concerns the knot “thought” (perception, recognition, conceptualization, association, memory, ...) / “language” (words, syntagmas, grammatical categories, writing, actions...): although it is evident that «many traces of what we think and commonly know filter into what we say... » (1965a: 2), that knot is not is not a tight one (in deterministic sense). Indeed, «We shall not find in language an exact replica of any- thing the community thinks ... » (1985a: 1). In other words, «... between the purely noetic and linguistic levels there is not necessarily isomorphism» (1985b: 37). This insight, which emerges in all its potentiality in the memorable works I sei lati del mondo e La foresta di piume, unlocks the vital space of elasticity, approximation, indeterminacy, the ‘blurred boundaries’ between the flow of thought and the systems we have to en- code it, and expresses the essential nature of the human condition. In my text, I partially represent the intellectual climate in which the figure of Cardona is placed – as I grasped and remember it today – from my point of view as a student who asked him for and then wrote his degree thesis.