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Special Issue (2024)

A língua portuguesa em diacronia

Volume 24 (2024) Next

Publication date: 08.10.2024

Licence: CC BY  licence icon

Editorial team

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Orcid Jakub Kornhauser, Orcid Tomasz Krupa

Editor-in-Chief Orcid Wacław Rapak

Issue Editors Orcid Przemysław Dębowiak, Orcid João Paulo Silvestre

Issue content

Estudos Textuais

Joanna Serafim

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 101-109

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.011.20344
Medieval charters played a fundamental role in establishing rights and duties between the king and local communities. In Portugal, until the reign of D. Dinis (1279–1325), all official documentation from the royal chancellery was exclusively in Latin, although Portuguese had long circulated as a spoken language, but also in writing in unofficial contexts. Therefore, the first charters constitute a privileged corpus for the study of the Portuguese language, since the same content, in both Latin and Portuguese, is transmitted across various locations and time periods. The 12th and 13th centuries are a phase of transition and affirmation of Portuguese as a written language and these documents reflect it, as they contain forms and structures typical of Classical and Medieval Latin, as well as from the vernacular language. This article aims, on the one hand, to identify the vernacular lexical forms present in the charter of Santa Cruz de Vilariça, written in Latin, and to understand why they are incorporated into it; on the other hand, to analyse the syntactic structures typical of Portuguese that coexist with Latin casual syntax.
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Ana Paula Banza, Helena Freire Cameron

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 111-120

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.012.20345
This text analyses Father António Vieira’s spelling practices in História do Futuro based on a new conservative manuscript reading. Written, for the most part, between 1664 and 1665, the fragments of the História do Futuro that have come down to us, attached to Vieira’s inquisitorial process, are working texts, unpolished versions, which, therefore, may eventually reveal some marks of the “classic” period of Portuguese. On the other hand, taking into account that Vieira’s training in spelling falls within the “etymological” period and that his reputation places him among the “good authors”, also in terms of spelling, we seek to identify the conservative and innovative marks and, eventually, the manifestation of an individual practice, which, as is known, was, in Vieira’s time and until the beginning of the 20th century, a notorious trend, particularly among great writers.
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Ignacio Vázquez Diéguez, Ana Belén Cao Míguez

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 121-130

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.013.20346
The aim of this paper is to show a record of the state of the Portuguese language at the beginning of the 19th century, when the changes that led to contemporary Portuguese began to be produced and consolidated, using a representative sample of translations from Spanish to Portuguese linked to the Napoleonic invasions. As these sources are texts in which the Portuguese language meets the Spanish language through translation, we also observe some phenomena or occurrences that result from this.
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Justyna Wiśniewska

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 131-139

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.014.20347
Family letters are written texts addressed from a sender to a clearly defined recipient. The texts in question have a dialogue structure which, as Kałkowska (1982: 6) notes, “should be treated as a set of speech acts”. Therefore, in this article, we analyse the corpus made up of Portuguese family letters written in the first half of the 19th century, with the aim of describing the means of voicing expressive and directive speech acts.
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Lexicografia e Lexicologia

Mário Eduardo Viaro

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 143-151

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.015.20348
Among the problems existing in entries in etymological dictionaries, one of the most serious is the absence or imprecision of a terminus a quo, that is, the oldest dating of the lexical item in the available documentation. Diachronic explanations often present large gaps, due to the lack of descriptions of the lexicon and its neological results in past synchronies. Furthermore, the distinction between graphic variation and lexical variation is not always clear in etymological dictionaries of the Portuguese language, which compromises not only the knowledge about the existence of a specific lexical item in a past synchrony, but also – even more seriously – the entire diachronic explanation that involves these data and the resulting theoretical conclusions. To describe part of this picture, backdating exercises are carried out on lexical items derived with the suffix -eiro, with a specific semantic field (“profession”), contrasting information from the Dicionário Houaiss and works by Jerónimo Cardoso (ca. 1508–1569).
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João Paulo Silvestre

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 153-177

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.016.20349
The article analyses the treatment of proper names, particularly anthroponyms, in metalinguistic works and dictionaries in Portugal up to the 18th century. Prior to Rafael Bluteau’s work from 1728, authors such as Fernão de Oliveira and Duarte Nunes de Leão primarily focused on the phonological and orthographic features of anthroponyms. In terms of lexicography, the anthroponyms identified are not many, mostly in connection with biblical names. From the mid-17th century, names from the Greco-Latin and Christian traditions were adapted and recorded, following the criteria similar to those established for orthographic regularization referring to etymology.
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Przemysław Dębowiak

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 163-181

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.017.20350
Thesaurus Polyglottus is a lexicographical work published in 1603 in Frankfurt am Main by a German linguist and historian, Hieronymus Megiser. It is a multilingual dictionary that contains more than 8 thousand articles displayed on almost 1600 pages. The Latin entries are followed by equivalents in various languages, mainly European. In each article the author presents as many equivalents as he was able to collect. Portuguese linguistic material is only represented in around 170 articles, which, however, does not make it any less interesting. The article exposes, at various levels (graphic-phonetic, morphological and semantic), the traits of the Portuguese words included in this work which are mostly botanical and zoological terms. Taking these factors into account, we also try to identify the possible sources of the Portuguese vocabulary, among which works of Conrad Gessner and Amato Lusitano from the 16th century stand out.
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Joanna Drzazgowska

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 183-193

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.018.20351
The Portuguese noun gente comes from the Latin word gens, gentis, which can mean ‘family grouping’, ‘clan’, ‘the house in its entirety’, ‘family’, ‘people’, ‘race’, ‘generation’, ‘offspring’, ‘number of people’, ‘someone of importance’. The aim of this article is to analyse the meaning and use of the word gente in European Portuguese and to attempt to show how the meaning of the Latin word has evolved in Portuguese over time. For this purpose, definitions of gente from selected dictionaries published from the end of the 18th century to the 21st century are analyzed. The next stage of our analysis is an attempt to compare data and information from dictionaries with the real use of the word gente. The corpus of our analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, is Portuguese literature from the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Edyta Jabłonka, Ieda Maria Alves

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 195-206

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.019.20352

This article aims to present and lexicographically examine culinary loanwords in Portuguese. Our study shows that dictionaries do not always match what we can see in the language. However, we also found that borrowings have a big impact on Portuguese culinary vocabulary. The main aim of examining the selected examples is to detect some grammatical, spelling, and semantic inaccuracies. Dictionaries exhibit hesitation in spelling certain loanwords, as well as hesitations regarding the grammatical numer of borrowed terms and divergencies in the integration of foreign terms.

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Línguas em Contacto

Barbara Hlibowicka-Węglarz, João Batista Cardoso

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 209-218

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.020.20353

In Portuguese America, the general languages were the languages of indigenous origin used by the administration and the Church as an instrument of interethnic communication. These languages were spoken by everyone who was part of the colonial system. In the Brazilian territory, two general languageswere formed in very different linguistic contexts: the Língua Geral Paulista (LGP) and the Língua Geral Amazónica (LGA). Established in the 16th century, LGP emerged in the São Vicente region and was widely spread by the bandeirantes of São Paulo to other states in the 17th and 18th centuries. After a period of great expansion, and because of the political and social changes that took place in colonial society, this general language lost its hegemony in the 19th century and ceased to be spoken at the beginning of the 20th century. The article aims to analyse the socio-historical conditions that led to the formation, expansion, weakening and disappearance of the General Language of São Paulo.

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Esperança Cardeira, Alina Villalva, Laura do Carmo

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 219-229

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.021.20354

From the 15th century onwards, the Portuguese language became a colonial instrument. In non-European territories, the Portuguese imposed themselves on different cultures, but they also welcomed new words, alongside the discovery of hitherto unknown realities. Bluteau’s Vocabulario offers a large amount of information about Portuguese contact with indigenous languages, as in the case of Brazil. The expression “Brazilian word” is used by Bluteau in entries that refer to Brazilian  pecificities, generally autochthonous plants and animals, as well as some artefacts. Bluteau’s lexicographical writing reflects both the vision of the world of his time and the lexicographer’s personal point of view, illustrated by information that is sometimes well-founded and sometimes quite fanciful.

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Natalia Czopek

Romanica Cracoviensia, Special Issue (2024), Volume 24 (2024), pp. 231-240

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.022.20355

In this paper, we intend to make some observations about the changes that can be observed in Cape Verde’s language policy, with a special focus on the social use and prestige attributed to European Portuguese (EP) over the centuries. The analysis concentrates on two chosen contexts in which the EP currently has a certain vitality: formal education and religious services. This part also includes the results of an individual sociolinguistic project carried out in situ, in which an oral corpus of 150 interviews with adult informants from the islands of São Vicente and Santiago (89 women and 61 men) was collected, with their level of education, frequency of exposure to EP, and age as sociolinguistic variables. The methodology used to analyse the data is quantitative, and the focus of the questions is put on the current situation of the EP as a result of the historical and social processes previously described.

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Funding information

This publication was funded by the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and by the Vergílio Ferreira Chair of Camões – Institute for Cooperation and Language.