Portuguese language: Encyclopedia II - Portuguese language - Vocabulary

Portuguese language - Vocabulary

The Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa, by Antônio Houaiss (1915 – 1999), son of Lebanese immigrants in Brazil and former Brazilian Minister of Culture, was created with the support of almost two hundred lexicographers from several countries and is the most complete Portuguese dictionary to date (about 228,500 entries, 376,500 acceptations, 415,500 synonyms, 26,400 antonyms and 57,000 historical words) It includes all variations of the Portuguese language (African, Asian, Brazilian and European Portuguese). Dedicating his life to the language, Houaiss started his work in 1986, and died one year before the dictionary was completed by his colleagues in the year 2000, without seeing his dream come true. The dictionary is quickly becoming a reference to the language, some classifying it as a "monument to the language".

Portuguese, both in morphology and syntax, 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 90% of the vocabulary is still derived from the language of Rome. Some of the changes began during the Empire, others took place later. In the Late Middle Ages, Portuguese was changing as much as French, but a conservative policy re-approached it to Latin.

Another specially relevant shift was the loss of the intervocalic /l/ in a very large set of words, already described in the list above as an example of "elision" → e.g: SALIRE → sair; COLARE → coar; NOTVLA → nódoa, with the typical Portuguese voicing of /t/ in /d/ (AMATVS → amado). Fewer words remained unchanged, or reevolved to the original word, such as taberna (tavern) or coxa (thigh). Since the Renaissance, Portuguese became subject to the influence of Literary Latin, other than the spoken form from which Portuguese evolved, due to authors love for antiquity. Thus many adjectives in Portuguese have literary origin and the respective substantive has the popular form: ouro (gold) and áureo (golden) both from Latin, AVRV. Other words have popular and erudite synonyms: The Latin LOCALE (place) which evolved to the people's lugar has local as an erudite synonym.

Very few traces of the native or pre-Roman settlers like the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Iberians, or Celts lexicon persist in the language, but there are some exceptions, such as Abóbora (pumpkin) and Bezerro (year-old calf) from Iberian languages or Cerveja (beer) and Saco (bag) from Celtic and Phoenician, respectively.

Post-Roman influences, before the Discovery age, were also small. The Germanic influence in Portuguese was restricted to warfare and related topics, such has Barão (baron) from Germanic baro or Guerra (war) from Gothic *����� (*wirro). Projections indicate 1000 Arabic loan words, including: Aldeia (village) from التجارية (aldaya), Alface (lettuce) from الخس (alkhass), Armazém (warehouse) from المخزن (almahazan), Azeite (olive oil) from زيت (azzait) and most words starting with "al".

With the Portuguese discoveries linguistic contact was made, and the Portuguese language became influenced by other languages other than European or Arabic. In Asia, the language gained words such as catana (cutlass) from Japanese katana, Corja (rabble) from Malay Kórchchu or chá (tea) from Mandarin Chinese chá. In South America, the language gained words such as Ananás, from Tupi-Guarani naná and Abacaxi from Tupi ibá cati both relating to different species of pineapple, or even Tucano (toucan) from Guarani tucan. The African influence in lexicon was made in Brazil and Africa (mostly in Angola) include words such has Bungular (to dance like African wizards) from Kimbundu kubungula or Cafuné (affections made in the head) from Kimbundu kifumate. Many names of places and local animals have Amerindian names in Brazil; in Angola and Mozambique, the same occurring with the local Bantu languages. These influences are also small even in the local variations of Portuguese in Brazil and Africa.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Vocabulary", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki