Philology and lexicology: lexico-semantic study of an 18th century manuscript

Abstract

Languages inevitably reflect the influences of socio-historical, geographic and cultural elements that are related to the history of their speakers. The lexicon, therefore, is the place where these influences are perceived and identity definitions are marked, as is the case of Brazil and mainly of Brazilian Portuguese (hereinafter BP), born from the contact between Europeans, indigenous peoples and Africans. In this sense, we can notice, even today, the lexical borrowings arising from indigenous and African languages, in addition to the language of immigrants, and which enriched the Portuguese language on Brazilian soil. Thus, in this article, based on the principles of Lexicology and on the corpus taken from the semi-diplomatic edition of the document Plano Sobre a Civilização dos Índios do Brasil, an attempt was made to survey the indigenous lexias used by the soldier Domingos Muniz Barreto, in order to analyze the Indigenous influence on Brazilian Portuguese in the 18th century and the attempt to establish a Portuguese spelling for indigenous words. The methodology was based on Queiroz (2012). It was concluded that Domingos’ lexical repertoire and the use of vocabulary of indigenous origin reveal the clues for a “grammaticalization” of indigenous languages, through spelling in Portuguese, and that this already demonstrates an incorporationof these in BP itself.