Interactions between Portuguese (as a first and second language) and missionary sources in the 18th century

Abstract

As Classen (2006: 39) points out, “people in the pre-modern age were already travelling heavily, whether as merchants, diplomats, artists, pilgrims, or scholars”, which “required an intensive investment in foreign languages”. In 18th century Portuguese, we have on the one hand a group of scholars and academics who became increasingly involved with the grammatical description of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL), and on the other hand, another smaller group who continued the work of missionary grammars (Zwartjes 2011), produced mainly in the 17th century. The first group, most of whom were foreign, is associated with early PFL grammar, which for more than two centuries (mid-17th to the late 19th century) was mostly published outside Portugal and written in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, depending on the target audience. This contact between different modern European languages (Romance and Germanic) promoted the development of comparative philology. As for the second group, consisting of Catholics from different orders, its missionary work also included, as is known, the learning and teaching in Portuguese of non-Indo-European languages, based on a Eurocentric tradition. The aim of this presentation is to analyse the historical framework in which the grammatical description of Portuguese (predominantly, though notexclusively, as a second language) was beginning to emerge just as the Portuguese codification of exotic languages (Zwartijes 2011: 1) was starting to decline after its 'explosion' in the 17th century.