Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))

Frank Rossi iglesias at axia.it
Mon Apr 5 17:02:21 UTC 1999


Further to my posting which ended as follows:

>Finally, and this is the point, it is probable that not only the Galician
>dialects, but also standard (Lisbon) Portuguese also changed considerably
>from the original "galego-portugue's" brought from the North by the
>"reconquistadores", as can be inferred by the fact that the Northern
>Portuguese dialects are in many ways still closer to Galician than to
>standard Portuguese, again as discussed in recent posts.

To complete my "pleading", I found the following information on the above
in my usual source (Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed.
Gredos, Madrid, 1971, chapter on "Evolucio'n de la lengua portuguesa", p.
217):

"... for Re'vah (1) there must have been a very ancient tendency to close
to /u/ all unaccented "o"'s, *except in final position* although this
tendency was contrasted by the "cultista" reaction which always replaced
the orthographic and etymological "o", while final "e" and "o" were
uniformly represented by closed "e" and closed "o" (2) until the early
decades of the 18th Century"

(1) I.S. Re'vah, "L'e'volution de la prononciation au Portugal et au
Bre'sil du XVIe sie'cle a' nos jours" ("Anais do primeiro Congresso
Brasileiro da li'ngua falada no teatro", Rio, 1958) and "Comment et
jusqu'a' quel point les parlers bre'siliens permettent-ils de reconstituer
le syste'me phone'tique des parlers portugais des XVe-XVIIIe sie'cles
("Actas do III Colo'quio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros", vol.
I, Lisboa, 1959).

(2) It is curious to note that this is the present pronunciation of
Galician." [end of quotation]

*.. * = my emphasis FR

If this is true, then it is demonstrated that Portuguese final /u/ is not a
continuation of the Latin nominative case, which was our starting point.

In the same context (p. 220) I also found the following:

"Important phonetic changes (although no longer reflected in spelling) that
took place in the *18th Century* were, for example, the transformation into
a fricative (Eng. "sh") of the affricate (Eng. "ch") (1)...

(1) While for Joa~o Franco Barreto, who published his "Ortografi'a da
li'ngua portuguesa" in 1671, and for Joa~o de Morais Marureira Feijo',
whose "Ortografi'a ou arte de escrever e pronunciar com acerto a lingua
portuguesa" was published in 1734), the fricative pronunciation of "ch" was
a dialectal feature of *Estremadura*, for Luis Antonio Verney ... who
published his "verdadeiro Me'todo de Estudar" in 1746, it is the most
correct and recommendable pronunciation. [end of quotation]

*.. * = my emphasis FR

The affricate pronunciation is still used in Galician and Northern Portugal
(where however it is *now* considered incorrect), e.g. "chamar" vs.
"shamar".

The demonstrates simply that, like European and American English, Spanish,
Portuguese, and French), in the case of Portuguese and Galician (or, if you
prefer, the Galician dialects) sometimes it is one of the variants that
innovates and sometimes the other.

Portuguese innovated on final "o" and fricative "ch" (= "sh")
All Galician (with the exception of a few isolated areas), in parallel with
Castilian, Asturian, etc., innovated in the unvoicing of voiced "s" and
"zh" and (most of Galicia, but not all) in pronouncing "zeta" as "th".

I rest my case.

Regards

Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it



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