Portuguese language

“ That this ancient accentuation, and with it the groundwork of metrical perfectibility, should be preserved in the Portuguese language, is a circumstance rendered the more remarkable by that of a French prince having been the founder of the first dynasty of the kings of Portugal; for from this incidental occurrence, some critics and philologists have endeavoured to explain the similarity between the Portuguese and French pronunciation. ”

“ Now the Portuguese language was then, as the loud complaint of Lobo sufficiently proves, frequently denied, even in Portugal, any claim to the possession of that accuracy and elegance, without which poetry, deficient merely in cultivation, might indeed exist, but which is indispensably necessary to prose composition, when it is to be elevated above the formal style of ceremony, and the negligent expression of common life. ”

“ To make Portugal complete, Brazil and the colonies were necessary to this country whose language is spoken on the European continent by only five millions of men; and again the narrow domain which so restricts the use of this tongue creates an obstacle to the popularity of the works to which language gives birth, just as its poverty impedes the development of the fine arts. Jealousy and indifference, the double affliction of southern nations, have curbed the artistic and literary aspirations of the Portuguese. ”

“ The Portuguese language as spoken in the provinces and by the peasants is far clearer and more attractive than as it is often spoken at Lisbon. As to the written language, it is too often debased by Gallicisms and by sesquipedalian words. It appears to shun directness like the plague. A “large crowd” becomes an “innumerable multitude,” a “fine view” is an “admirable panorama,” a horse is a solipede, a dog is um exemplar canino (O Seculo, 21st June, 1915) . ”

“ No great literature can come of Portuguese as it is at present too often spoken and written, and without a literature a nation dwindles and dies. (Witness the Basques, who have the vigour of six ordinary nations, and are losing their language and nationality because they have never given much attention to the written word, content with their splendid old games and customs.) It is a pity that the passion for politics in Portugal has not inspired its devotees with nobler prose ”

“ The singular adaptability of the Portuguese language to poetical expression, coupled with the imaginative temperament of the people, has led to an unusual production and appreciation of poetry. The percentage of educated men who have written little volumes of lyrics is surprisingly large, and this may be accounted for by the old Portuguese custom of reciting poetry with musical accompaniment. ”

“ The illiterate peasant is no whit behind the man of culture in the purity of his Portuguese. In no country in Europe is the language kept freer from dialect, and this notwithstanding the fact that it is one of involved grammatical forms. In France the use of the imperfect subjunctive is given up by the lower classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. ”

“ The Portuguese language has the peculiarity of the Italian and Spanish languages in making Substantives and Adjectives, by the addition of a syllable augmentative or diminutive.
I. Augmentativos. homem, a man homemzarão, a large, powerful man tolo, a fool toleirão, a great fool mulher, the woman mulherona, a large masculine woman tola, the foolish woman toleirona, a very foolish woman. ”

“ The third period of Portuguese poetry and eloquence arises so imperceptibly out of the second, that no particular date, or remarkable event in Portuguese literature can be said to form a dividing point between them. The influence of the French taste on the Portuguese is the characteristic mark of the commencement of this last period. But even that influence never produced any thing like a revolution in the state of polite learning in Portugal. French taste worked its way into the language and the literature of the Portuguese, as tranquilly as into their manners. ”

“ The Portuguese language, for instance, is exceedingly rich in interjections, and moreover these interjections are in common use, to an extent which at first strikes a foreigner as excessive and almost unpleasant, but which he soon learns to appreciate. ”

“ To causes of a totally different nature and in which political interests were but remotely concerned, must be attributed the zeal with which the Portuguese, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cultivated the language and literature of Spain, along with their mother tongue and the learning of their own country; while the Spaniards of the same period regarded the Portuguese poetry as a mere scion of the Spanish, and besides, generally speaking, looked down with contempt on the language and literature of Portugal. ”

“ In about a fortnight I found myself conversing in Portuguese with considerable fluency.
Those who wish to make themselves understood by a foreigner in his own language should speak with much noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide. Is it surprising that the English are, in general, the worst linguists in the world, seeing that they pursue a system diametrically opposite? ”

“ It is a question of encouraging the indigenous side of Portuguese civilisation—in language, literature, dress, legislation, drama, cookery, in everything—which since the sixteenth century has been set aside for the imported foreign-erudite; to develop as it were the Saxon element at the expense of the Norman. The people have succeeded in keeping many of their old and excellent customs—but by the skin of their teeth now—as they have their own names for many of the Lisbon streets and their own words side by side with those of learned origin. ”

“ The foreigner, who is not prepossessed by any national partiality, in favour of either the Castilian or the Portuguese modifications of the Hispanic romance, might, perhaps, be induced to conclude that poetry would on the whole have sustained no essential loss, had the language of Portugal been rejected by literature, and reduced like the Galician dialect to the rank of a common popular idiom ”

“ The natives in contact with the Portuguese learned a bastard variety of the language of the latter, which became the lingua franca of intercourse, not only between European and native, but occasionally between Europeans of different nationalities. This Indo-Portuguese dialect continued to serve such purposes down to a late period in the last century, and has in some localities survived down nearly to our own day. [11] The number of people in India claiming to be of Portuguese descent was, in the 17th century, very large. ”

“ The degree of cultivation by which these gentlemen are distinguished from the ordinary portion of society, leads them, in the first place, to discourse of literature. One of the party very properly observes, that, the country library of a man of their class, should consist chiefly of works on history, poetry, and practical philosophy. This gives rise to an encomium on the Portuguese language, which at that period had to contend with enemies in its native land, and which was still more vehemently attacked by the Spaniards. ”

“ It has by nature that softness and pliancy which the Castilian only attains exceptionally, at the hands of genius, and in Portuguese it is for the master hand to give this language that force and concision which comes naturally to the Castilian, and which was once a characteristic of Portuguese also. The saying, “Fortune usually kicks a man when he’s down,” is expressed in Portuguese in three words, “Sobre queda coices”—“after fall kicks,” and innumerable words are in Portuguese reduced to half the length they have in Latin and in other modern Romance languages. ”

“ It is natural, then, that early letters in Brazil should have been Portuguese not only in language, but in inspiration, feeling and spirit. Similarly, we find the early intellectual dependence of the Spanish American countries upon Spain, even as later both the Spanish and the Portuguese writers of America were to be influenced greatly by French literature. "Brazilian poetry," says Verissimo in the little essay already referred to, "was already in the seventeenth century superior to Portuguese verse." ”

“ Along the Sea-coasts the Portuguese have left a Vestige of their Language, tho' much corrupted, yet it is the Language that most Europeans learn first to qualify them for a general Converse with one another, as well as with the different inhabitants of India. ”

“ At the commencement of the present book it was remarked, that the loss of independence experienced by the kingdom of Portugal, was attended with no immediate injury to Portuguese literature. The Spanish language could obtain no higher consideration in Portugal than it already enjoyed. The humbled national pride took pleasure in the courageous defence of the national language, and the Castilian tongue only served to remind the patriotic Portuguese of the ignominious occupation of his country. ”

“ The Spaniards seem always to have felt convinced that they could not attain the romantic tenderness of the Portuguese.20 A certain simplicity and intensity in the expression of tender sentiments, to which the language of Portugal is particularly favourable, has always been one of the characteristic features of Portuguese poetry, from the fifteenth century down to the present times. ”

“ Although they speak Portuguese like the other inhabitants of the country, among themselves they always make use of their own language, always intermarry, are said to pay no attention to the religious observances of the country, nor to use any form of worship of their own ”

“ An effort to avoid the bad taste of the preceding age, and upon the whole to cultivate a clear and dignified form of expression, is perceptible in most of the modern treatises of the Portuguese. Empty bombast has given place to the language of reason. The Portuguese nation have 391 now to wish for a modern historian qualified to tread in the footsteps of Barros, Brito and Andrada. Such a writer might succeed in still more firmly rivetting the connecting link between the promising present and glorious past in the hearts of Portuguese patriots. ”

“ Several of the newspapers are large, newsy and well printed. Linotype machines, web presses—all the modern machinery in use in the North—will be found in the emporium of South America.
Portuguese is the language of Brazil, Spanish of the Argentine, and any one going to these countries to transact business without first acquiring an inkling of these languages will find himself at a great disadvantage. The foreigner who can speak both languages will succeed much better than the person who sticks to his native tongue. ”

“ But the effect of the union is very imperfectly appreciated by a foreigner; and the finest charm of the expression is lost in the labour of studying a poetic language of this kind. Besides the simplicity of 68 the composition does not exclude from Saa de Miranda’s eclogues, those mysterious allusions to the romantic manners of the age, which are so common in the writings of the old Portuguese poets. ”

“ The blacks, on arriving from the interior, put up at the towns on the coast, where the natives, having been in constant intercourse with the whites for years, all speak Portuguese, and many of them English. It is a fact that the natives speak Portuguese more correctly than they do English, which I attribute to the good custom of the Portuguese very seldom stooping to murder their language [Pg 105] when speaking to the blacks, which the English universally do, under the mistaken idea of rendering themselves more intelligible. ”

“ No important early literature remains in Galician, and of Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of this dialect, and of its development later into the language of Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed. ”

“ Many parts of South America have suffered from over-praise as much as from unmerited blame. None 7have suffered more than Brazil, shut off from the non-Latin world rather more than is Spanish America because of her Portuguese idiom. There is little enough thorough study of Spanish on the part of Anglo-Saxons, but it is mighty compared to the study of Portuguese, a beautiful language and probably rather more readily acquired than the formal and clear-cut idiom of Castile. Non-comprehension of Portuguese and Spanish has been a bar to understanding of the soul of Latin America ”

“ The Brazilians are particular what they buy, and want the best. They are not satisfied with just anything, as some seem to believe. Sometimes a change in established models might be profitable—at least it would be wise to print labels and directions in Portuguese for the convenience [361] of the people, as well as to please them by such a compliment. Travelling representatives should be sent who not only speak the language, but understand a little bit of the Latin nature, and their methods of doing business. ”

“ With the single exception of Rodriguez Lobo, whose Corte na Aldea afforded in Portugal the first example how a poet could elevate the language of common life, without confounding the boundaries of poetry and 253 elegant prose, no Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century in any way contributed to the cultivation of eloquence ”