Elogios da língua portuguesa

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Maria Helena da Rocha
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/mathesis.2006.5090

Praises of the Portuguese language have often been written, mostly since António Ferreira, the only poet who, contrarywise to his most famous contemporaries, never wrote a single line in Spanish. Other writers also extolled the beauty and variety of Portuguese, its most celebrates praise being the one by Rodrigues Lobo in the following century. Then came the invasion of the so called “Galiciparlas” in the eighteenth century, who were heavily criticized by other Portuguese poets, most of all by Filinto Elísio and Elpino Duriense, who compared the variety and richness of the vocabulary of the Portuguese speech not only with Spanish, Italian and French, but also with the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages. In so doing, Elpino Duriense adumbrates a phonic approach, which appears to prove that the much discussed closing of pretonic vowels, mostly [e] and [o], did not occur before the beginning of the nineteenth century (this phenomenon being now a distinctive trait between Portuguese and Brazilian pronunciation. Twentieth century poets, starting with the much celebrated saying of Fernando Pessoa that the Portuguese language was is country, had significant echoes en Alberto Lacerda, Jorge de Sena and Rui Knopfli, also a set of poets who were educated or lived in English speaking countries. All these poets testify to the agglutination power of language.