THE TRADITION OF LUSITANIAN APPENDICES - AN EXAMPLE FROM THE 17TH CENTURY

Abstract

This article analyzes the section “Advertencias en ordem a emendar, e melhorar as palavras, que a inorancia do vulgo tẽ corrutas”, a list of “wrong and amended” words that can be found as an appendix to the work Ortografia da Lingua Portugueza, by  João Franco Barreto (1671).  This aims to (1) demonstrate that there is a grammatical tradition in the Portuguese language in the manner of the Appendix Probi, which was started by Leão in 1576;  and (2) describe this list of words from the perspective of Sociolinguistics, since it is a record of pronunciations typical of Baroque Portuguese.  For this, the category Metaplasm is adopted to characterize the phonetic variations represented in this appendix. The “Advertencias” section presents a normative purpose, it is structured in two columns, follows a contrasting method and can be transmitted separately without loss to its purpose.  These characteristics qualify it as belonging to the tradition of Portuguese appendices (appendices lusitanae). In general, these words manifest 3 kinds of variations, which still occur in Portuguese today, which are: vowel raising (melhoràmilhor), competition between [v] and [b] (varreràbarrer);  and insertion of prosthetic vowels (recadaràarrecadar).