"PLACE-NAMES OF SARDINIA".

A void is filled, finally. It is a piece of work that causes a sensation, that makes a clean sweep of many volumes dripping empty talk to demonstrate... the indecipherability of Sardinian village names. The linguists have surrendered. They have in fact investigated the etymology only on the basis of Latin, Catalan, Aragonian dictionaries, leaving out seven hundred years of Phoenician-Punic language, not at all concerned with knowing the language spoken by Sardoes before the Phoenicians. They were paralized by the assertion of the Sardinian linguistic master, Max Leopold Wagner, whose opinion was that in the current Sardinian language there are only five or seven Phoenician words. Wagner was wrong. Nevertheless the question does not exclude that his followers have mixed up two concepts that are necessary to keep distinct: the first about langage and the second about toponomastics.

Salvatore Dedòla, linguist and environmental geographer, allows every scholar to reappropriate the method of searching. As a matter of fact, as language flows like a river, the toponym is a word that sediments, becoming a territorial predicate and behaving not as semanteme but as a tout court sign, as a geographical coordinate, as an archeological find, able to give some flashes of local history, of economy, of religion and society. It roughly behaves as an archeological find, and in addition the toponym has the gift... of the word.

Therefore you are required to investigate the toponym with instruments surely similar to those of the archeologist, but moreover with historical-geographical tools, and as for the languages, the knowledge of the dictionaries of all the peoples that from the beginning of time have affected the local language is required: Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Ugaritians, Aramaians, Phoenicians, Jewish, Catalans, Ancient-Sardians, Spanish, Italians.

Salvatore Dedòla adds together 1900 never before registered etymologies. His Toponomastica Sarda becomes a milestone that explains every toponym and, throughout, he succeeds in showing a section of the economy and society of 3000 years ago, reaching the mythical linguistic level of Shardanas, of which he reveals more than 1000 headwords.

The book contains an environmental methodology so severe, that the Author has refused to examine the toponyms of which he doesn’t know exactly the place and the surrounding landscape. The very interesting study is based not only on the Indo-european, Semitic, Neo-Latin languages, but also on a geographic culture fed on geology, botany, pedology, landscape, history, archeology.

The knowledge of the Phoenician language has at last supported the Author in a task where generations of Orientalists have failed. He has given a clear, filologically correct reading of the highly famous Stele of Nora, the most ancient written document of the centre-west Mediterranean.