When did the Portuguese language develop?
History of Portuguese
"Modern Portuguese" developed from the early 16th century to the present. During the Renaissance, scholars and writers borrowed many words from classical Latin (learned words borrowed from Latin also came from Renaissance Latin) and ancient Greek, which increased the complexity of the Portuguese lexicon. Most literate Portuguese speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Portuguese. As with most European vernacular languages, the standardization of the Portuguese language was propelled by the development of the printing press. In 1536 Fernão de Oliveira published his "Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa" in Lisbon, the first Portuguese grammar. The work of this heterodox Dominican priest, philologist and mariner was soon followed. In 1540, João de Barros crown officer published his "Gramática da Língua Portuguesa" along with moral dialogues and basics of the Catholic Church to help teaching young aristocrats. This second work, illustrated with woodcuts, is considered the world's first printed illustrated text book.
Portuguese language
Portuguese has provided loanwords to many languages, such as Indonesian, Manado Malay, Malayalam, Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese, Malay, Bengali, English, Hindi, Swahili, Afrikaans, Konkani, Marathi, Tetum, Xitsonga, Japanese, Lanc-Patuá (spoken in northern Brazil), Esan and Sranan Tongo (spoken in Suriname). It left a strong influence on the "língua brasílica", a Tupi–Guarani language, which was the most widely spoken in Brazil until the 18th century, and on the language spoken around Sikka in Flores Island, Indonesia. In nearby Larantuka, Portuguese is used for prayers in Holy Week rituals.
The Japanese–Portuguese dictionary "Nippo Jisho" (1603) was the first dictionary of Japanese in a European language, a product of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan. Building on the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries, the "Dictionarium Anamiticum, Lusitanum et Latinum" (Annamite–Portuguese–Latin dictionary) of Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) introduced the modern orthography of Vietnamese, which is based on the orthography of 17th-century Portuguese. The Romanization of Chinese was also influenced by the Portuguese language (among others), particularly regarding Chinese surnames; one example is "Mei". During 1583–88 Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci created a Portuguese–Chinese dictionary – the first ever European–Chinese dictionary.
Portuguese vocabulary
Most of the Portuguese vocabulary comes from Latin, because Portuguese is a Romance language. However, other languages that came into contact with it have also left their mark. In the thirteenth century, the lexicon of Portuguese had about 80% words of Latin origin and 20% of pre-Roman Gallaecian and Celtiberian, Germanic and Arabic origin.
Galicia (Spain)
As with many other Romance languages, Galician-Portuguese emerged as a literary language in the Middle Ages, during the 12th and 13th centuries, when a rich lyric tradition developed, followed by a minor prose tradition, whilst being the predominant language used for legal and private texts till the 15th century. However, in the face of the hegemony of Castilian Spanish, during the so-called "Séculos Escuros" ("Dark Centuries") from 1530 to the late 18th century, it fell from major literary or legal written use.
As a literary language it was revived again during the 18th and, most notably, the 19th-century ("Rexurdimento" "Resurgence") with such writers as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Murguía, Manuel Leiras Pulpeiro, and Eduardo Pondal. In the 20th century, before the Spanish Civil War the "Irmandades da Fala" ("Brotherhood of the Language") and "Grupo Nós" included such writers as Vicente Risco, Ramón Cabanillas and Castelao. Public use of Galician was largely suppressed during the Franco dictatorship but has been resurgent since the restoration of democracy. Contemporary writers in Galician include Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Suso de Toro.
Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese developed in the region of the former Roman province of Gallaecia, from the Vulgar Latin (common Latin) that had been introduced by Roman soldiers, colonists and magistrates during the time of the Roman Empire. Although the process may have been slower than in other regions, the centuries of contact with Vulgar Latin, after a period of bilingualism, completely extinguished the native languages, leading to the evolution of a new variety of Latin with a few Gallaecian features.
Alentejan Portuguese
Alentejan Portuguese is a dialect of Portuguese spoken in the Portuguese region of Alentejo. It is also spoken, with its own subdialect, in the Spanish municipalities of Olivenza and Táliga which for several centuries (1297 to 1801) were part of Portugal; in this area the language is currently endangered.The 2005 report of the Council of Europe's expert group on the implementation in Spain of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 2005 asked the Spanish government to furnish information about the situation of Oliventian Portuguese, and for measures for the protection and promotion of that language under the provisions of Article 7 of the Charter. However, in the report submitted by Spain in 2006, there are no references to Oliventian Portuguese.
Portuguese language in Goa
Only with the resumption of diplomatic relations between Portugal and India in 1974, including the installation of Portuguese institutions like the Consulate-General in Panaji in 1992, followed by the Instituto Camões and the Fundação Oriente later on, was there a resumption for the demand for the Portuguese language.
Portuguese poetry
The beginnings of Portuguese poetry go back to the early 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal separated from the medieval Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this region that the ancestral language of both modern Portuguese and modern Galician, known today as Galician-Portuguese, was the common language of the people. Like the troubadour culture in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into personal insults, as she had hurt her lover's pride. However, this region produced a specific type of song, known as "cantigas de amigo" (songs of a friend). In these, the lyrical subject is always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about her friend (lover) from whom she has been separated - by war or other activities - as shown in the Reconquista. They discuss the loneliness that the woman feels. But some poems also project eroticism, or confess the lover's meeting in a secret place, often through a dialogue she has with her mother or with natural elements (such could be considered a custom adapted from the pagan peoples in the region). Epic poetry was also produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions ("Gesta de D. Afonso Henriques", of unknown authorship).
With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics - "cantigas de amigo" were written even by kings, like Denis of Portugal.
Geographical distribution of French speakers
The anti-Portuguese factor of Brazilian nationalism in the 19th century led to an increased use of the French language to the detriment of Portuguese, as France was seen at the time as a model of civilization and progress. The learning of French has historically been important and strong among the Lusophone high societies, and for a great span of time it was also the foreign language of choice among the middle class of both Portugal and Brazil, only surpassed in the globalised postmodernity by English, in both, and more recently by Spanish, in the latter.
Culture of Póvoa de Varzim
The Povoan accent known as "Falar poveiro" (Povoan speech), "Sotaque poveiro" (Povoan accent) or simply "Poveiro", occasionally erroneously called "caxineiro", is a sub-dialect or variety of the Portuguese dialect known by linguists as "Interâmnico" and, popularly, as "Nortenho" or Northern Portuguese, which is the oldest dialect of the Portuguese language and it is spoken in Coastal Northern Portugal from Viana do Castelo to Porto and, inland, it reaches Braga. The region is the birthplace of the Portuguese language. There are two subdialects: Porto-Póvoa and Braga-Viana, each of these subdialects is further divided into Porto, Póvoa, Braga, and Viana. The Póvoa one is the transitional dialect between the speeches of Braga and Porto.
Portuguese vocabulary
Between the 8th and mid 13th centuries, Portugal was occupied and under the influence of the Islamic Emirate of Cordoba known as (Al-Andalus). During that period, although the local populations continued to speak Western Romance, and further south Mozarabic dialects; Arabic being the elite language, lent many new words to Portuguese, thanks to a rich cultural and scientific legacy left in the Iberian Peninsula and the Western world in the Middle Ages.
Words such as 'algebra','algorism (algorithm)', 'alcohol', 'azimuth', 'sugar', 'coffee' and many others were incorporated into Portuguese and are everyday words:
Galician-Portuguese
As Portugal's territory was extended southward during the Reconquista, the increasingly-distinctive Portuguese language was adopted by the people in those regions, supplanting the earlier Arabic and other Romance/Latin languages that were spoken in these conquered areas during the Moorish era. Meanwhile, Galician was influenced by the neighbouring Leonese language, especially during the time of kingdoms of Leon and Leon-Castile, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, it has been influenced by Castilian. Two cities at the time of separation, Braga and Porto, were within the County of Portugal and have remained within Portugal. Further north, the cities of Lugo, A Coruña and the great medieval centre of Santiago de Compostela remained within Galicia.
Norte Region, Portugal
The region has been inhabited since prehistoric times and is a key area for the understanding of both Atlantic European, Megalithic and Castro cultures. Historically, Northern Portugal, with Galicia in Spain, made up the Kingdom of Galicia. In protohistoric times, it was inhabited by Gallaeci tribes, related with the Lusitanians, and it corresponds roughly to Conventus Bracarensis of Roman Gallaecia. The historical Suebic Kingdom (5th-6th centuries AD) had its capital in the now Portuguese city of Braga and most of these migrants and invaders established themselves in Littoral Northern Portugal, when the Roman empire collapsed. After the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, a small county was established around the city of Porto, which still in the 10th century expanded and became a government, the County of Portugal. This county grew in ambition and it was where Portugal's first king, Dom Afonso Henriques, established the Portuguese kingdom and stated the southward expansion. The Portuguese language developed in this area, and has a specific modern dialect, Northern Portuguese, taken down south as the Portuguese Kingdom expanded, namely after Afonso Henriques era.
Iberian federalism
The Portuguese language and Galician languages evolved from the medieval Galician-Portuguese when the County of Portugal separated from the Kingdom of León by becoming the Kingdom of Portugal. On the other hand, the Galician language has become increasingly influenced by the Castilian language since Galicia's incorporation into the Crown of Castile as a dependent Kingdom of León.
Portuguese Renaissance
Due to the success of the Portuguese Empire, and the padroado of the Portuguese missionary efforts, the Portuguese language came to be known as the "Christian language" in many parts of Asia. In concordance with the principles of the Portuguese Renaissance, many schools of learning and colleges were founded throughout Portugal and its empire.
Nheengatu
To understand Nheengatu as it exists today, it is crucial to understand its historical origins and its evolution. Moore (2014) documents the historical development of Nheengatu, which is a case of language contact that has stretched over five hundred years, ever since the Portuguese landed in Brazil in 1500. Upon European contact, there was a lot of cultural and commercial exchange. European men also sought after local women and started families, producing children (or mestizos) who would speak their native language, which is the now-extinct precursor of Nheengatu called Tupinambá (also known as Brasílica or Coastal Tupi). Europeans also learned this language in order for them to act as middlemen, and Tupinambá went on to be used in the colony after the Portuguese settled down in the new lands permanently. By the mid-16th century, Jesuits arrived in Bahia, Brazil. These missionaries were active learners of the native languages, even producing language manuals. Better-known linguistic works from the 16th and early 17th century are "Arte da Grammatica da Lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil" by Father José de Anchieta (1595) and "Arte da Língua Brasilíca" by Luis Figueira (1621).
Portuguese language
Starting in the 15th century, the Portuguese maritime explorations led to the introduction of many loanwords from Asian languages. For instance, "catana" "cutlass" from Japanese "katana", "chá" "tea" from Chinese ""chá"", and "canja" "chicken-soup, piece of cake" from Malay.
Portuguese-based creole languages
Portuguese overseas exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries led to the establishment of a Portuguese Empire with trading posts, forts and colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Contact between the Portuguese language and native languages gave rise to many Portuguese-based pidgins, used as linguas francas throughout the Portuguese sphere of influence. In time, many of these pidgins were nativized, becoming new stable creole languages.
Portuguese language
Its spread was helped by mixed marriages between Portuguese and local people and by its association with Roman Catholic missionary efforts, which led to the formation of creole languages such as that called Kristang in many parts of Asia (from the word "cristão", "Christian"). The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century. Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.
Portuguese-based creole languages
Although sometimes classified as a creole, the Cupópia language from the Quilombo do Cafundó, at Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo, discovered in 1978 and spoken by less than 40 people as a secret language, is better classified as a Portuguese variety since it is structurally similar to Portuguese, in spite of having a large number of Bantu words in its lexicon. For languages with these characteristics, H. H. do Couto has forged the designation of anticreole, which would be the inverse of a creole language, as they are seen by the non-European input theories (i.e.: creoles = African languages grammar + European languages lexicon; anticreoles = European languages grammar + African languages lexicon).
Language secessionism
The Portuguese kingdom, a former southern county split from the Kingdom of Galicia and fief of the Kingdom of Leon, was created by Afonso I of Portugal in 1126 and expanded towards the Islamic south, like its neighbouring kingdoms. That part of Galicia, named Portugal, became independent while the northern part of the country remained under the Kingdom of León during the 12th century and early 13th century. Northern Galicia would later be ruled by the Kingdom of Castile, which would become the core and ethnic base for the future Spain; but the culture was the same on both sides of the political border. Galician-Portuguese culture attained great prestige during the Low Middle Ages. In the late 15th century, Castilian domination became harder, banishing their language in all official uses, including the church.
Guinean Portuguese
When the CPLP was founded in 1996, it helped Guinea-Bissau in education aside from peace talks there. Many Portuguese, Brazilian, and PALOP (mostly Angolan) teachers entered to increase Portuguese fluency among blacks. In 2005, in order to increase Portuguese fluency, there was an agreement between Guinean officials and Instituto Camões, which already had a center in Bissau, to open centers in other towns of the country: Canchungo, Ongoré, Mansôa, Bafatá, Gabú, Buba, Catió, Bolama, Bubaque, and Quinhamel. The percentage of Portuguese speakers increased to 14%.Bibliography on Guinean Portuguese
Romance languages
Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal, is spoken by virtually the entire population of 10 million.
As the official language of Brazil, it is spoken by more than 200 million people in that country, as well as by neighboring residents of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay, accounting for a little more than half the population of South America. It is the official language of six African countries (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe), and is spoken as a first language by perhaps 30 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau, while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000—are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians. In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language.
In Oceania, Portuguese is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor. Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain, together with Spanish.
Brazilian Portuguese
Translation
Portuguese dialects
Prescription and a common cultural and literary tradition, among other factors, have contributed to the formation of a Standard Portuguese, which is the preferred form in formal settings, and is considered indispensable in academic and literary writing, the media, etc. This standard tends to disregard local grammatical, phonetic and lexical peculiarities, and draws certain extra features from the commonly acknowledged canon, preserving (for example) certain verb tenses considered "bookish" or archaic in most other dialects. Portuguese has two official written standards, (i) Brazilian Portuguese (used chiefly in Brazil) and (ii) European Portuguese (used in Portugal and Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe). The written standards slightly differ in spelling and vocabulary, and are legally regulated. Unlike the written language, however, there is no spoken-Portuguese official standard, but the European Portuguese reference pronunciation is the educated speech of Lisbon.
History of Portuguese
Learned Latinisms were formed in the late Middle Ages, due to the use of Church Latin by the Catholic Church, and during the Renaissance, when Classical antiquity in general, and Literary Latin in particular, enjoyed great prestige. Thus, for example, Latin "aurum", which had originated "ouro" ("gold") and "dourado" ("golden"), was re-introduced as the adjective "áureo" ("golden"). In the same way, "locālem" ("place"), which had evolved to "lugar", was later reintroduced as the more erudite "local". Many erudite Greek words and combining elements were also introduced or reintroduced in this way. Because of this, many Latin words are still familiar to Portuguese speakers.
Portuguese Renaissance
The Portuguese Renaissance produced a plethora of poets, historians, critics, theologians, and moralists, of whom the Portuguese Renaissance was their golden age. Language was one of the purest parts of the Portuguese Renaissance, due to the large number of erudite words imported from classical Latin and ancient Greek, which greatly increased the complexity of the Portuguese language. The sixteenth century "Cancioneiro Geral", by Garcia de Resende, is often agreed upon to mark the end of Old Portuguese and the beginning of Modern Portuguese.
Portuguese language
The Portuguese language therefore serves more than 250 million people daily, who have direct or indirect legal, juridical and social contact with it, varying from the only language used in any contact, to only education, contact with local or international administration, commerce and services or the simple sight of road signs, public information and advertising in Portuguese.
Brazilian Portuguese
The failed colonization attempts by the French in Rio de Janeiro during the 16th century and the Dutch in the Northeast during the 17th century had negligible effects on Portuguese. The substantial waves of non-Portuguese-speaking immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (mostly from Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Japan and Lebanon) were linguistically integrated into the Portuguese-speaking majority within few generations, except for some areas of the three southernmost states (Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul)—in the case of Germans, Italians and Slavs—and in rural areas of the state of São Paulo (Italians and Japanese).
Tupian languages
When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, they found that wherever they went along the vast coast of this newly discovered land, most natives spoke similar languages. Jesuit missionaries took advantage of these similarities, systematizing common standards then named "línguas gerais" ("general languages"), which were spoken in that region until the 19th century. The best known and most widely spoken of these languages was Old Tupi, a modern descendent of which is still used today by indigenous peoples around the Rio Negro region, where it is known as "Nheengatu" (), or the "good language". However, the Tupi family also comprises other languages.
Portuguese Renaissance
From the Portuguese Renaissance, there was no greater writer than Luís de Camões, whose treasured works have nicknamed the Portuguese language as the "Language of Camões". Camões was instrumental in reintroducing classical forms of literature, most importantly the epic, through his 1572 masterpiece, "Os Lusíadas", considered one of the greatest pieces of Portuguese literature from all time.
Portuguese language in Goa
The history of the Portuguese dialect began in Goa due to Portuguese rule in the region that lasted for over 450 years. During the existence of the Portuguese State of India, Portuguese was used extensively, in government or in the education system. In addition to the official government media, it was also used by missionaries in their missions, although the Portuguese language coexisted with other languages.
Galician language
Modern Galician and its sibling, Portuguese, originated from a common medieval ancestor designated variously by modern linguists as Galician-Portuguese (Mediaeval Galician, Medieval Portuguese, Old Galician or Old Portuguese). This common ancestral stage developed in the territories of the old Kingdom of Galicia, which covered the territories of modern-day Galicia and northern Portugal. In the century it became a written and cultivated language. In the past Galician and Portuguese formed a dialect continuum, which many scholars contend still exists today at the level of rural dialects. Others point out that modern Galician and Portuguese have diverged to such an extent during the past seven centuries that they now constitute two closely related but separate languages.
Portuguese discoveries
Portuguese discoveries (Portuguese: "Descobrimentos portugueses") are the numerous territories and maritime routes discovered by the Portuguese as a result of their intensive maritime exploration during the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of European overseas exploration, discovering and mapping the coasts of Africa, Canada, Asia and Brazil, in what became known as the Age of Discovery. Methodical expeditions started in 1419 along West Africa's coast under the sponsorship of prince Henry the Navigator, with Bartolomeu Dias reaching the Cape of Good Hope and entering the Indian Ocean in 1488. Ten years later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama led the first fleet around Africa to India, arriving in Calicut and starting a maritime route from Portugal to India. Portuguese explorations then proceeded to southeast Asia, where they reached Japan in 1542, forty-four years after their first arrival in India. In 1500, the Portuguese nobleman Pedro Álvares Cabral became the first European to discover Brazil.
Portuguese language
When the Romans arrived at the Iberian Peninsula in 216 BC, they brought the Latin language with them, from which all Romance languages descend. The language was spread by Roman soldiers, settlers, and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous Celtic or Celtiberian civilizations established long before the Roman arrivals. For that reason, the language has kept a relevant substratum of much older, Atlantic European Megalithic Culture and Celtic culture.
Galicians
Galician-Portuguese diverged into two linguistic varieties - Galician and Portuguese - from the 15th century on. Galician became a regional variety open to the influence of Castilian Spanish, while Portuguese became the international one, as language of the Portuguese Empire. The two varieties are still close together, and in particular northern Portuguese dialects share an important number of similarities with Galician ones.
History of Portuguese
Both in morphology and in syntax, Portuguese represents an organic transformation of Latin without the direct intervention of any foreign language. The sounds, grammatical forms, and syntactical types, with a few exceptions, are derived from Latin, and almost 80% of its vocabulary is still derived from the language of Rome. Some of the changes began during the Empire, others took place later. A few words remained virtually unchanged, like "carro", "taberna" ("tavern"), or even returned to a form close to the original, such as "coxa" ("thigh") – in this case, however, only the spelling looks identical: Latin ⟨"x"⟩ and Portuguese ⟨"x"⟩ designate two completely different sounds, and respectively.
Galician language
The linguistic stage from the to the centuries is usually known as Galician-Portuguese (or "Old Portuguese", or "Old Galician") as an acknowledgement of the cultural and linguistic unity of Galicia and Portugal during the Middle Ages, as the two linguistic varieties differed only in dialectal minor phenomena.
Caipira dialect
The formation of the "caipira" dialect began with the arrival of the Portuguese in São Vicente in the sixteenth century. Ongoing research points to several influences, such as Galician-Portuguese, represented in some archaic aspects of the dialect, and the "língua geral paulista", a Tupian Portuguese-like creole codified by the Jesuits. The westward colonial expansion by the Bandeirantes expedition spread the dialect throughout a dialectal and cultural continuum called Paulistania in the provinces of São Paulo, Mato Grosso (later, Mato Grosso do Sul and Rondônia), Goiás (with the Federal District), and Minas Gerais.
José
The Portuguese phonology developed originally from thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese, having a number of speakers worldwide that is currently larger than French, Italian and German. In Portuguese the pronunciation of the graphemes and is in fact phonetically the same as in French, where the name "José" also exists and the pronunciation is similar, aside from obvious vowel variation and language-specific intonation.
Galician language
Galician-Portuguese lost its political unity when the County of Portugal obtained its independence from the Kingdom of Leon, a transition initiated in 1139 and completed in 1179, establishing the Kingdom of Portugal. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Galicia was united with the Kingdom of León, and later with the Kingdom of Castile, under kings of the House of Burgundy. The Galician and Portuguese standards of the language diverged over time, following independent evolutionary paths. Portuguese was the official language of the Portuguese chancellery, while Galician was the usual language not only of troubadours and peasants, but also of local noblemen and clergy, and of their officials, so forging and maintaining two slightly different standards.
During the reign of Alfonso X, Castilian Spanish became the official language of the chancellery of the Kingdom of Castile. However, in Galicia and neighboring regions of Asturias and León in 1200–1500, the local languages remained the usual written languages in any type of document, either legal or narrative, public or private. Castilian was progressively introduced through Royal decrees and the edicts of foreign churchmen and officials. This led, from the late 15th century on, to the end of legal documents in Galician; the last ones were issued around 1530. Also, from 1480 on, notaries of the Crown of Castile were required to obtain their licenses in Toledo, where they had to prove their mastery of Spanish.
In spite of Galician being the most spoken language, during the 17th century the elites of the Kingdom began speaking Castilian, most notably in towns and cities. The linguistic situation in Galicia became one of diglossia, with Galician as the low variety and Spanish as the high one. In reaction to the relegation of the autochthonous language, a series of literary and historical works (always written in Spanish) appeared in the 17th century through 19th century, meant to vindicate the history, language, people, and culture of Galicia. The period from the 16th century to the early 19th century, when Galician had little literary—and no legal—use, is considered the dark age of Galician language. The Galician spoken and written then is usually referred to as "Middle Galician".
Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990
In Portugal the change was signed into law on 21 July 2008 by the President allowing for a 6-year transitional period, during which both orthographies co-existed. On 1 January 2012 the government adopted the spelling reform in official documents and in the Diário da República. The transition period ended on the 12th of May 2015. As of January 2016, transitions have also ended in Cape Verde and Brazil, making the reformed Portuguese orthography obligatory in three of the nine lusophone countries.
Brazilian Portuguese
The development of Portuguese in Brazil (and consequently in the rest of the areas where Portuguese is spoken) has been influenced by other languages with which it has come into contact, mainly in the lexicon: first the Amerindian languages of the original inhabitants, then the various African languages spoken by the slaves, and finally those of later European and Asian immigrants. Although the vocabulary is still predominantly Portuguese, the influence of other languages is evident in the Brazilian lexicon, which today includes, for example, hundreds of words of Tupi–Guarani origin referring to local flora and fauna; numerous West African Yoruba words related to foods, religious concepts, and musical expressions; and English terms from the fields of modern technology and commerce. Although some of these words are more predominant in Brazil, they are also used in Portugal and other countries where Portuguese is spoken.
Portuguese language
Beginning in the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African and Asian slaves, and local populations led to the appearance of many pidgins with varying amounts of Portuguese influence. As each of these pidgins became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into fully fledged creole languages, which remained in use in many parts of Asia, Africa and South America until the 18th century. Some Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creoles are still spoken today, by over 3 million people worldwide, especially people of partial Portuguese ancestry.
History of Portuguese
It appears that the sound written ⟨"v"⟩ was at one point during the medieval period pronounced as a voiced bilabial fricative . Subsequently, it either changed into a labiodental fricative (as in central and southern Portugal, and hence in Brazil), or merged into (as in northern Portugal and Galicia, similarly to modern Spanish). Also similarly to modern Spanish, the voiced stops eventually became pronounced as fricatives between vowels and after consonants, other than in the clusters (the nasals were presumably still pronounced in these clusters, rather than simply reflected as a nasal vowel). However, this change happened after the colonization of Brazil, and never affected Brazilian Portuguese.
History of Portuguese
What modern scholars call "Galician-Portuguese" was originally the native language of the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, which was founded in 410 and included the northern part of present-day Portugal. It appears to have also been used regularly in other Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula as the language for lyric song. It was employed by poets from throughout the non-Basque medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula; including Leonese, Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan. It is also the language used in the "Cantigas de Santa Maria". These songs were traditionally attributed to Alfonso X, a Castilian king, though more recent work shows that they must have been composed in collaboration with many translators, poets and musicians.
List of lingua francas
Portuguese served as lingua franca in the Portuguese Empire, Africa, South America and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of lingua franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through a process of change the lingua franca and Portuguese lexicon was replaced with the languages of the people in contact.
Portuguese language
Many Portuguese settlers to Colonial Brazil were from northern and insular Portugal, apart from some historically important illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Europe, such as Galicia, France and the Netherlands. Brazil received more European immigrants in its colonial history than the United States. Between 1500 and 1760, 700,000 Europeans (overwhelmingly Portuguese) settled in Brazil, while 530,000 Europeans settled in the United States for the same given time.
List of territorial entities where Portuguese is an official language
Due to the one country, two systems policy of China regarding its special administrative regions, Macau is able to retain Portuguese as an official language alongside Cantonese. Portuguese was first introduced to Macau when Portuguese traders established a permanent settlement there in 1537. Despite being a Portuguese colony for over four centuries, the Portuguese language was never widely spoken in Macau and remained limited to administration and higher education and was spoken primarily by the Portuguese colonists, Macanese people of mixed ancestry, and elites and middle-class people of pure Chinese blood. As a consequence, when Macau was handed back to China in 1999, Portuguese did not have a strong presence like English had in Hong Kong and continued its decline which began when Portuguese rule was still occurring. It was only after Portuguese rule ended when the Portuguese language in Macau began to see an increase in speakers due to China's increased trading relations with Lusophone countries. There has been an increase in the teaching of Portuguese owing to the growing trade links between China and lusophone nations such as Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor, with 5,000 students learning the language. Today, about 3% of Macau's population speaks Portuguese as a first language and 7% of the population professes fluency. A Portuguese creole called Macanese (Patuá) was spoken by Macanese of mixed ancestry but is near extinction today.
Manuel Ferreira (writer)
In 1988, he was interested in an essay names "Que Futuro para a Língua Portuguesa em África?", the African emeritus which "was five" [African nations] that took part "in the principle of its language and a cultural fact", transformed Portuguese into a "orality plan and a writer plan". "For himself, the future would be like this" A language that is none for all, without a master. And if there is a language, the Portuguese language, there are different variants: the variant of Guinea-Bissau, the variants of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, the variants of Angola, Mozambique Brazil, Galicia, East Timor and the variant of Portugal. Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and East Timor has different languages, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe has Creole languages, and parts of Brazil speaks different languages, Galician is a separate language, the language resembles Portuguese.
Portuguese-based creole languages
The earliest Portuguese creole in the region probably arose in the 16th century in Malacca, Malaysia, as well as in the Moluccas. After the takeover of those places by the Dutch in the 17th century, many creole-speaking slaves were taken to other places in Indonesia and South Africa, leading to several creoles that survived until recent times:The Malacca creole also had an influence on the creole of Macau (see below).
Portuguese language
Portuguese evolved from the medieval language, known today by linguists as Galician-Portuguese, Old Portuguese or Old Galician, of the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia and County of Portugal. It is in Latin administrative documents of the 9th century that written Galician-Portuguese words and phrases are first recorded. This phase is known as Proto-Portuguese, which lasted from the 9th century until the 12th-century independence of the County of Portugal from the Kingdom of León, which had by then assumed reign over Galicia.
Portuguese language
Most of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived, directly or through other Romance languages, from Latin. Nevertheless, because of its original Lusitanian and Celtic Gallaecian heritage, and the later participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery, it has some words from pre-Latin Paleohispanic languages and adopted loanwords from other languages around the world.
Portuguese Empire
Today, Portuguese is one of the world's major languages, ranked sixth overall with approximately 240 million speakers around the globe. It is the third most spoken language in the Americas, mainly due to Brazil, although there are also significant communities of lusophones in nations such as Canada, the US and Venezuela. In addition, there are numerous Portuguese-based creole languages, including the one utilized by the Kristang people in Malacca.
Galician culture
As with many other Romance languages, Galician-Portuguese emerged as a literary language in the Middle Ages, during the 12th-13th century, when a rich lyric tradition developed. However, in the face of the hegemony of Castilian Spanish, during the so-called "Séculos Escuros" ("Dark Centuries"), from 1530 to 1800, it fell from major literary or legal use, revived again during the 19th century "Rexurdimento" with such writers as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Murguía, Manuel Leiras Pulpeiro, and Eduardo Pondal. In the 20th century, before the Spanish Civil War the "Irmandades da Fala" ("Brotherhood of the Language") and "Grupo Nós" included such writers as Vicente Risco, Ramón Cabanillas and Castelao; the Seminario de Estudos Galegos promoted the study of the language. Public use of Galician was largely suppressed in Francoist Spain but has been resurgent since the restoration of democracy. Contemporary Writers in Galician include Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Manuel Rivas, and Suso de Toro.
Glossary of Japanese words of Portuguese origin
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Japan and the first to establish direct trade between Japan and Europe, in 1542. During the 16th and 17th century, Portuguese Jesuits had undertaken a great work of Catechism, that ended only with religious persecution in the early Edo period (Tokugawa Shogunate). The Portuguese were the first to translate Japanese to a Western language, in the "Nippo Jisho" dictionary (, literally the "Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary") or "Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam" compiled by Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues, and published in Nagasaki in 1603, who also wrote a grammar "Arte da Lingoa de Iapam" . The dictionary of Japanese-Portuguese explained 32,000 Japanese words translated into Portuguese. Most of these words refer to the products and customs that first came to Japan via the Portuguese traders.
Portuguese literature
Prose developed later than verse and first appeared in the 13th century in the shape of short chronicles, lives of saints, and genealogical treatises called "Livros de Linhagens". In Portuguese chanson de geste has survived to this day, but there are medieval poems of romantic adventure given prose form; for example, the "Demanda do Santo Graal" (Quest for the Holy Grail) and "Amadis of Gaul". The first three books of the latter probably received their present shape from João Lobeira, a troubadour of the end of the 13th century, though this original has been lost and only a 16th-century Spanish version remains. The "Book of Aesop" also belongs to this period. Though the cultivated taste of the Renaissance affected to despise the medieval stories, it adopted them with alterations as a homage to classical antiquity. Hence came the cycle of the "Palmerins" and the "Chronica do Emperador Clarimundo" of João de Barros. The medieval romance of chivalry gave place to the pastoral novel, the first example of which is the "Saudades" of Bernardim Ribeiro, followed by the "Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor, a Portuguese writer who wrote in Spanish. Later in the sixteenth century Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso, a fascinating storyteller, produced his "Historias de Proveito e Exemplo".
Portuguese language
The end of the Old Portuguese period was marked by the publication of the "Cancioneiro Geral" by Garcia de Resende, in 1516. The early times of Modern Portuguese, which spans the period from the 16th century to the present day, were characterized by an increase in the number of learned words borrowed from Classical Latin and Classical Greek because of the Renaissance (learned words borrowed from Latin also came from Renaissance Latin, the form of Latin during that time), which greatly enriched the lexicon. Most literate Portuguese speakers were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing – and eventually speech – in Portuguese.
Portuguese language
Between the 9th and early 13th centuries, Portuguese acquired some 400 to 600 words from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the initial Arabic article "a(l)-", and include common words such as "aldeia" "village" from الضيعة "alḍai`a" (or from Edictum Rothari: "aldii", "aldias"), "alface" "lettuce" from الخس "alkhass", "armazém" "warehouse" from المخزن "almakhzan", and "azeite" "olive oil" from الزيت "azzait".
Bible translations into Portuguese
Although the biblical themes have been essential formative substance of the Portuguese culture, it is late the composition in that language of a complete translation of the Bible, in comparison with the other European languages. The beginnings of the written transmission of the sacred text in Portuguese, parallel to its traditional liturgical use in Latin, are related to the progressive social acceptance of the vernacular as a language of culture in the low-medieval period. And even though the official language of the Portuguese monarchy dates back to the end of the thirteenth century, during the reign of D. Dinis, the writer Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1851-1925), for example, was able to state categorically that, in the medieval period, "Portuguese literature, in matters of biblical translations, is a poverty Desperate "- a judgment that remains valid, experts say.
Portuguese language
It should be noticed that the diversity of dialects of the Portuguese language is known since the time of medieval Portuguese-Galician language when it coexisted with the Lusitanian-Mozarabic dialect, spoken in the south of Portugal. The dialectal diversity becomes more evident in the work of Fernão d'Oliveira, in the Grammatica da Lingoagem Portuguesa, (1536), where he remarks that the people of Portuguese regions of Beira, Alentejo, Estremadura, and Entre Douro e Minho, all speak differently from each other. Also Contador d'Argote (1725) distinguishes three main varieties of dialects: the local dialects, the dialects of time, and of profession (work jargon). Of local dialects he highlights five main dialects: the dialect of Estremadura, of Entre-Douro e Minho, of Beira, of Algarve and of Trás-os-Montes. He also makes reference to the overseas dialects, the rustic dialects, the poetic dialect and that of prose.
Museum of the Portuguese Language
On a large panel, the remote Indo-European origins of languages are shown. The history and evolution of Portuguese is traced from Archaic Latin through Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin and old Romance languages to the three elements that make up the heart of contemporary Portuguese: Lusitanian Portuguese, languages indigenous to Brazil and African languages. The panel covers six thousand years of human history and is the product of research by professor Ataliba de Castilho.
Brazilian Portuguese
In BP, the preposition "para" can also be used with such verbs with no difference in meaning:According to some contemporary Brazilian linguists (Bortoni, Kato, Mattos e Silva, Perini and most recently, with great impact, Bagno), Brazilian Portuguese may be a highly diglossic language. This theory claims that there is an L-variant (termed "Brazilian Vernacular"), which would be the mother tongue of all Brazilians, and an H-variant (standard Brazilian Portuguese) acquired through schooling. L-variant represents a simplified form of the language (in terms of grammar, but not of phonetics) that could have evolved from 16th-century Portuguese, influenced by Amerindian (mostly Tupi) and African languages, while H-variant would be based on 19th-century European Portuguese (and very similar to Standard European Portuguese, with only minor differences in spelling and grammar usage). Mário A. Perini, a Brazilian linguist, even compares the depth of the differences between L- and H- variants of Brazilian Portuguese with those between Standard Spanish and European Portuguese. However, his proposal is not widely accepted by either grammarians or academics. Milton M. Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monograph: "Portuguese language (A linguistic introduction)", published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.
Portuguese language
In the kingdom of Portugal, "Ladinho" (or "Lingoagem Ladinha") was the name given to the pure Portuguese language romance, without any mixture of Aravia or Gerigonça Judenga. While the term "língua vulgar" was used to name the language before D. Dinis decided to call it "Portuguese language", the erudite version used and known as Galician-Portuguese (the language of the Portuguese court) and all other Portuguese dialects were spoken at the same time. In a historical perspective the Portuguese language was never just one dialect. Just like today there is a standard Portuguese (actually two) among the several dialects of Portuguese, in the past there was Galician-Portuguese as the "standard", coexisting with other dialects.
Languages of Brazil
Before the first Portuguese arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by several Amerindian people, who spoke different languages. According to Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues there were six million Indians in Brazil speaking 1,000 different languages. When the Portuguese settlers arrived, they encountered the Tupi people, who dominated most of the Brazilian coast and spoke a set of closely related languages. The Tupi called the non-Tupi peoples "Tapuias", a designation that the Portuguese adopted; however, there was little unity among the diverse Tapuia tribes other than their not being Tupi. In the first two centuries of colonization, a language based on Tupian languages (known as Língua geral) was widely spoken in the colony, not only by the Amerindians, but also by the Portuguese settlers, Africans and their descendants. This language was spoken in a vast area from São Paulo to Maranhão, as an informal language for domestic use, while Portuguese was the language used for public purposes. Língua Geral was spread by the Jesuit missionaries and Bandeirantes to other areas of Brazil where the Tupi language was not spoken. Then, until the 1940s this language based on Tupi was widely spoken in some Northern Amazonian areas where the Tupi people were not present. In 1775, Marquês de Pombal prohibited the use of Língua geral or any other indigenous language in Brazil.
Langues d'oïl
The anti-Portuguese factor of Brazilian nationalism in the 19th century led to an increased use of the French language in detriment of Portuguese, as France was seen at the time as a model of civilization and progress. The learning of French has historically been important and strong among the Lusophone elites, and for a great span of time it was also the foreign language of choice among the middle class of both Portugal and Brazil, only surpassed in the globalised postmodernity by English, in both, and more recently by Spanish, in the latter.
List of loanwords in Malayalam
Most of the loan words from Portuguese language are for items which the native population lacked when the encounter with Portuguese empire happened from around the final years of the 15th century.
Portuguese was the lingua franca in Africa, Brazil, South Asia and parts of South East Asia during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The Portuguese Empire was the major ruling colonial power in South India during this period, they were first modern European power to encounter India on a large scale, and thus their language had a strong influence on Malayalam (similar to many other Indian languages).
Brazil–Portugal relations
Brazil–Portugal relations have spanned over four centuries, beginning in 1532 with the establishment of São Vicente, the first Portuguese permanent settlement in the Americas, up to the present day. Relations between the two are intrinsically tied because of the Portuguese Empire. They continue to be bound by a common language and ancestral lines in Portuguese Brazilians, which can be traced back hundreds of years.
Mozambican Portuguese
Portuguese is a post-colonial language. Imposed during the colonial era, Portuguese was selected as the official language of the new state as it was ethnically neutral. It was also the common language of the elites who received their post-secondary education in Portugal. Portuguese played an important role in the rhetoric of the independence movement, being seen as a potential vehicle for the articulation of a national identity.
Sign language
Until the 19th century, most of what is known about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets (fingerspelling systems) that were invented to facilitate transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language, rather than documentation of the language itself. Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584) is said to have developed the first manual alphabet.
Brazilian Portuguese
Beginning in the early 18th century, Portugal's government made efforts to expand the use of Portuguese throughout the colony, particularly because its consolidation in Brazil would help guarantee to Portugal the lands in dispute with Spain (according to various treaties signed in the 18th century, those lands would be ceded to the people who effectively occupied them). Under the administration of the Marquis of Pombal (1750–1777), Brazilians started to favour the use of Portuguese, as the Marquis expelled the Jesuit missionares (who had taught Língua Geral) and prohibited the use of Nhengatu, or Lingua Franca.
History of Portuguese
Phoneme [b] evolved as [v]. The phoneme was generally derived either (1) from an allophone of Latin between vowels or (2) from the Latin phoneme corresponding to the letter ⟨v⟩ (pronounced in Classical Latin, but later fortified to the status of a fricative consonant in Vulgar Latin). Elision—the consonants and of Vulgar Latin were deleted between vowels, after which sometimes the vowels around them coalesced, or an epenthetic semivowel was introduced between them. Original geminates , persisted, later becoming single , .
Judaeo-Romance languages
Judeo-Portuguese died in Portugal in the XVI century, surviving in the Jewish diaspora until around the late 18th or early 19th century.
Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese ( or ', or '), also known as Old Portuguese or as Medieval Galician when referring to the history of each modern language, was a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages, in the northwest area of the Iberian Peninsula. Alternatively, it can be considered a historical period of the Galician and Portuguese languages.
European Portuguese
The language is the same with different accents in many countries. It is a Latin based language, with Gaelic, Germanic, Greek and Arabic influence. It was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before as Galician-Portuguese. With the formation of Portugal as a country in the 12th century, the language evolved into Portuguese. In the Spanish province of Galicia, Northern border of Portugal, the native language is Galician. Both Portuguese and Galician are very similar and natives can understand each other as they share the same recent common ancestor. Portuguese and Spanish are different languages, although they share 89% of their lexicon.
Romance languages
Portuguese innovated again in developing a new extra-polite pronoun "o senhor" "the sir", which in turn downgraded "você". Hence, modern European Portuguese has a three-way distinction between "familiar" "tu", "equalizing" "você" and "polite" "o senhor". (The original second-person plural "vós" was discarded centuries ago in speech, and is used today only in translations of the Bible, where "tu" and "vós" serve as universal singular and plural pronouns, respectively.)
Portuguese-based creole languages
The Portuguese language was present in Portugal's colony Macau since the mid-16th century. A Portuguese creole, Patua, developed there, first by interaction with the local Cantonese people, and later modified by an influx of refugees from the Dutch takeover of Portuguese colonies in Indonesia.A few Portuguese-based creoles are found in South America:
Langues d'oïl
Portuguese was heavily influenced by more than a millennium of perennial contact with several dialects of both Oïl and Occitan language groups, in lexicon (up to 15–20% in some estimates, at least 5000 word roots), phonology and orthography. The influence of Occitan was, nevertheless, the most marked, through the status Provençal in particular achieved in southwestern Europe around the troubadour apex in the Middle Ages, when Galician-Portuguese lyric was developed. Aside the direct influence of Provençal literature, the presence of languages from modern-day France in the Galician-Portuguese area was also strong due to the rule of the House of Burgundy, the establishment of the Orders of Cluny and Cister, the many sections of the Way of St. James pilgrimage route that come from elsewhere in Europe out of the Iberian Peninsula, and the settlement in Iberia of people from the other side of the Pyrenees, arriving during and after the Reconquista.
Portuguese language
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, because of the role of Portugal as intermediary in the Atlantic slave trade, and the establishment of large Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil, Portuguese acquired several words of African and Amerind origin, especially names for most of the animals and plants found in those territories. While those terms are mostly used in the former colonies, many became current in European Portuguese as well. From Kimbundu, for example, came "kifumate" > "cafuné" "head caress" (Brazil), "kusula" > "caçula" "youngest child" (Brazil), "marimbondo" "tropical wasp" (Brazil), and "kubungula" > "bungular" "to dance like a wizard" (Angola). From South America came "batata" "potato", from Taino; "ananás" and "abacaxi", from Tupi–Guarani "naná" and Tupi "ibá cati", respectively (two species of pineapple), and "pipoca" "popcorn" from Tupi and "tucano" "toucan" from Guarani "tucan".
Mediterranean Lingua Franca
Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) was the first scholar to investigate the Lingua Franca systematically. According to the monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins he developed, Lingua Franca was known by Mediterranean sailors including the Portuguese. When Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of Lingua Franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through a process of relexification, the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon was substituted by the languages of the peoples in contact.
Portuguese Renaissance
The standardization of the Portuguese language started in 1536, when Fernão de Oliveira published his "Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa", the first literary piece that laid rules and standards for the Portuguese language. In 1540, João de Barros, a distinguished officer of the Portuguese crown, published the "Grammatica da Língua Portuguesa com os Mandamentos da Santa Madre Igreja", which taught the standards of the Portuguese language alongside the morals and culture of the Portuguese people. João de Barros's "Grammatica" was the second piece that sought to standardize the Portuguese language, and is considered the world's first illustrated text book.
History of Portuguese
Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, the ancient Romans brought with them Latin, from which all Romance languages descend. The language was spread by arriving Roman soldiers, settlers and merchants, who built Roman cities mostly near the settlements of previous civilizations. Later, the inhabitants of the cities of Lusitania and the rest of Romanized Iberia were recognized as citizens of Rome.
Reforms of Portuguese orthography
Contrary to neighboring languages such as Spanish or French, whose orthographies were set by language academies in the 17th century, Portuguese had no official spelling until the early 20th century; authors wrote as they pleased.
Luís de Menezes Bragança
By the age of twenty, Menezes Bragança had gained a reputation as a fine writer in the Portuguese language. On 22 January 1900, together with another Goan writer Messias Gomes he co-founded "O Heraldo" (The Herald), which was the first Portuguese language daily in Goa. His columns in the newspaper were typified by satirical wit, wherein he would attack the Portuguese government and reactionary thinking from Hindu and Catholic intellectuals. Menezes Bragança was a strong believer in secularism and propounded the ideals of a Secular republic in his columns, prior to the formation of the Portuguese First Republic on 5 October 1910.
Sri Lankan Portuguese creole
The Portuguese reached India in 1498, before coming to Sri Lanka in 1505. By that time a distinct pidgin of Portuguese had probably begun to develop, and this was used as the basis for communication with the new territory’s inhabitants. There is very little documented evidence of the linguistic situation at the time, however, it is clear that by the early 17th century a Portuguese-based pidgin was in use in the Portuguese controlled littoral, and was not unknown in the kingdom of Kandy because of its frequent dealings with outsiders. Also, a creole community had been established consisting of two groups or creole speakers: the Topazes (Tupasses, mestiços, etc.), "dark-skinned or half-cast people claiming Portuguese descent, and Christian profession, and Kaffirs (Caffres, etc.), or Bantus".
Bible translations into Portuguese
The first complete translation of the Bible into Portuguese was composed from the mid-seventeenth century, in specific regions of Southeast Asia under the domination of the Dutch East India Company. The man responsible for its elaboration process was João Ferreira Annes d'Almeida (c. 1628-1691), native of the Kingdom of Portugal, but resident among the Dutch since his youth. A first edition of his New Testament translation was printed in Amsterdam in the year 1681, in the passage that the books of the Old Testament were published from the eighteenth century onwards in Tranquebar and Batavia.
Monogenetic theory of pidgins
According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by and . It assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages.
Brazilian Portuguese
The written language taught in Brazilian schools has historically been based by law on the standard of Portugal, and until the 19th century, Portuguese writers often were regarded as models by some Brazilian authors and university professors. However, this aspiration to unity was severely weakened in the 20th century by nationalist movements in literature and the arts, which awakened in many Brazilians a desire for a national style uninfluenced by the standards of Portugal. Later, agreements were reached to preserve at least an orthographic unity throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, including the African and Asian variants of the language (which are typically more similar to EP, due to a Portuguese presence lasting into the second half of the 20th century).
History of Portuguese
Roman control of the western part of Hispania was not consolidated until the campaigns of Augustus in 26 BC. Although the western territories to the south of the Tagus River were only conquered after the victory of Licinius Crassus in the year 93 BC, only an estimated four hundred words of the native languages persist in modern Portuguese. After 200 years of wars first with the Carthaginians in the Eastern part of the peninsula, and then the local inhabitants, emperor Augustus conquered the whole peninsula, which was named Hispania. He then divided it into three provinces, Hispania Tarraconensis, Hispania Baetica, and Lusitania, the latter of which included most of modern Portugal. In the 3rd century, emperor Diocletian split Tarraconensis into three, creating the adjacent province of Gallaecia, which geographically enclosed the remaining part of Portugal, and modern-day Galicia (in the northwestern region of Spain).
History of Portugal (1415–1578)
The Portuguese Renaissance produced a plethora of poets, historians, critics, theologians, and moralists, for whom the Portuguese Renaissance was their golden age. The "Cancioneiro Geral" by Garcia de Resende (printed 1516) is taken to mark the transition from Old Portuguese to the modern Portuguese language.
Portuguese literature
Portuguese literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the Portuguese language, particularly by citizens of Portugal; it may also refer to literature written by people living in Portugal, Brazil, Angola and Mozambique, as well as other Portuguese-speaking countries. An early example of Portuguese literature is the tradition of a medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry, originally developed in Galicia and northern Portugal. The literature of Portugal is distinguished by a wealth and variety of lyric poetry, which has characterized it from the beginning of its language, after the Roman occupation; by its wealth of historical writing documenting Portugal’s rulers, conquests, and expansion; by the then considered Golden Age of the Renaissance period of which it forms part the moral and allegorical Renaissance drama of Gil Vicente, Bernardim Ribeiro, Sá de Miranda and especially the great 16th-century national epic of Luís de Camões, author of national and epic poem "Os Lusíadas" (The Lusiads).
Denis of Portugal
In 1290, Denis began to pursue the systematic centralisation of royal power by imposing judicial reforms, instituting the Portuguese language as the official language of the court, creating the first university in Portugal, and ridding the military orders in the country of foreign influences. His policies encouraged economic development with the creation of numerous towns and trade fairs. He advanced the interests of the Portuguese merchants, and set up by mutual agreement a fund called the "Bolsa de Comércio", the first documented form of marine insurance in Europe, approved on 10 May 1293. Always concerned with development of the country's infrastructure, he encouraged the discovery and exploitation of sulphur, silver, tin and iron mines and organised the export of excess production of agricultural crops, salt, and salted fish to England, Flanders, and France.
History of Portugal
Pre-Celtic tribes such as the Cynetes lived in the Algarve and Lower Alentejo regions before the 6th century BC, developed the city of Tartessos and the written Tartessian language, and left many stelae in the south of the country. Early in the first millennium BC, waves of Celts from Central Europe invaded and intermarried with the local populations to form several ethnic groups and many tribes. Their presence is traceable, in broad outline, through archaeological and linguistic evidence. Although they dominated much of the northern and central area, they were unable to establish in the south, which retained its non-Indo-European character until the Roman conquest. Some small, semi-permanent coastal settlements were founded by Phoenician-Carthaginians on the southern coast.
Language secessionism
Galician-Portuguese linguistic unity until the 16th century seems to be consensus, as does both Galician and European Portuguese being closer to each other and to the more conservative Portuguese variants of Brazil and Africa in the 18th century than in the 19th century, and also closer in the 19th century than in the 20th century and now. In this period, while Galician for the most part lost vowel reduction, velarization of and nasal vowels, and some speech registers of it adhered to "yeísmo", all making it phonologically closer to Spanish. For example, European Portuguese had splits that created two new vowel phonemes, one of them usually an allophone only in the case of vowel reduction and the other phonetically absent in any other variant. Some dialects had a merger of three of its oral diphthongs and another three of its nasal vowels, and together with Brazilian Portuguese absorbed more than 5000 loanwords from French as well as 1500 from English.
Spanish-based creole languages
In the 15th century, the island was uninhabited and discovered by Portugal but, by the 18th century, Portugal exchanged it and some other territories in Africa for Uruguay with Spain. Spain wanted to get territory in Africa, and Portugal wanted to enlarge even more the territory that they saw as the "New Portugal" (Brazil). Nevertheless, the populace of Ano Bom was against the shift and was hostile toward the Spaniards. This hostility, combined with their isolation from mainland Equatorial Guinea and their proximity to São Tomé and Príncipe—just 400 km from the island—has assured the maintenance of its identity.
List of territorial entities where Portuguese is an official language
With a population of over 205 million, Brazil is by far the world's largest Portuguese-speaking nation and the only one in the Americas. Portuguese was introduced during the Portuguese colonial period. Portuguese has also served as a lingua franca between the various ethnic groups in Brazil and the native Amerindian population after the Jesuits were expelled from every Portuguese territory and the languages associated with them prohibited.
Portuguese dialects
The language must not be confused with Portuñol, since it is not a mixing of Spanish and Portuguese, but a variety of Portuguese language developed in Uruguay back in the time of its first settlers. It has since suffered influence from Uruguayan Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
Galician-Portuguese lyric
In the Middle Ages, the Galician-Portuguese lyric, also known as trovadorismo in Portugal and trobadorismo in Galicia, was a lyric poetic school or movement. All told, there are around 1680 texts in the so-called secular lyric or "lírica profana" (see Cantigas de Santa Maria for the religious lyric). At the time Galician-Portuguese was the language used in nearly all of Iberia for lyric (as opposed to epic) poetry. From this language derives both modern Galician and Portuguese. The school, which was influenced to some extent (mainly in certain formal aspects) by the Occitan troubadours, is first documented at the end of the twelfth century and lasted until the middle of the fourteenth, with its zenith coming in the middle of the thirteenth century, centered on the person of Alfonso X, "The Wise King". It is the earliest known poetic movement in Galicia or Portugal and represents not only the beginnings of but one of the high points of poetic history in both countries and in Medieval Europe. Modern Galicia has seen a revival movement called Neotrobadorismo.
Portuguese-based creole languages
It has been conjectured that the vernacular of Brazil (not the official and standard Brazilian Portuguese) resulted from decreolization of a creole based on Portuguese and native languages; but this is not a widely accepted view. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is continuous with European Portuguese, and in fact quite conservative in some aspects.
Academic specialists compiled by linguist Volker Noll affirm that the Brazilian linguistic phenomena are the ""nativização"", nativization/nativism of a most radically Romanic form. The phenomena in Brazilian Portuguese are Classical Latin and Old Portuguese heritage. This is not a creole form, but a radical Romanic form. Regardless of borrowings and minor changes, it must be kept in mind that Brazilian Portuguese is not a Portuguese creole, since both grammar and vocabulary remain "real" Portuguese and its origins can be traced directly from 16th century European Portuguese. Some authors, like Swedish Parkvall, classify it as a semicreole in the concept defined by Holm: a semicreole is a language that has undergone “partial restructuring, producing varieties which were never fully pidginized and which preserve a substantial part of their lexifier’s structure (...) while showing a noticeable degree of restructuring”. Nevertheless, scholars like Anthony Julius Naro and Maria Marta Pereira Scherre demonstrated how every single phenomenon found in Brazilian Portuguese can also be found in regional modern European Portuguese and 1500s and 1600s European Portuguese, such as the epic poetry of Luís de Camões, as well as other Romance languages such as Aranese, French, Italian and Romanian, classifying these phenomena as a natural Romance drift. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is continuous with European Portuguese and its phonetics is more conservative in several aspects, characterizing the nativization of a koiné formed by several regional European Portuguese variations brought to Brazil and its natural drift.
Uruguayan Portuguese
The origin of Portuguese in Uruguay can be traced back to the time of the dominion of the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, and the Empire of Brazil. In those times, the ownership of those lands was not very well defined, passing back and forth from the hands of one crown to the other. Before its independence after the Cisplatine War in 1828, Uruguay was one of the provinces of the Empire of Brazil.
Portuguese language
Modern Standard European Portuguese (' or ') is based on the Portuguese spoken in the area including and surrounding the cities of Coimbra and Lisbon, in central Portugal. Standard European Portuguese is also the preferred standard by the Portuguese-speaking African countries. As such, and despite the fact that its speakers are dispersed around the world, Portuguese has only two dialects used for learning: the European and the Brazilian. Some aspects and sounds found in many dialects of Brazil are exclusive to South America, and cannot be found in Europe. However, the Santomean Portuguese in Africa may be confused with a Brazilian dialect by its phonology and prosody.