The sound variation reflected in writing

study of rhotacism in the history of the Portuguese language (17th – 20th centuries)

Abstract

In the scope of Socio-Historical Linguistics, the need to gather sources and studies that allow for a closer approximation to the language of past synchronies is emphasized. For this reason, working with manuscripts that are more transparent to orality, such as those written by writers with little writing ability, ensures greater contact with the forms of the language of each space/time. In this work, the objective is to describe the occurrences of the phenomenon of rhotacism in corpora from different historical periods, characterizing the contexts of occurrence, such as the position of the segment in the syllable and the grammatical class of the words, and to verify the type of corpus whereby the presence of the data is more considerable, whether from more or less poor writers, based on the characterization provided by previous studies. Rhotacism occurs when the lateral <l> changes to the <r> vibrant vortar (voltar); pero (pelo) and is a phenomenon that stigmatizes contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, mainly prevalent among those with little or no schooling. The results found indicate occurrences in different synchronies, such as barsfemo (blasfemo) (17th century), borça (bolsa) (19th century); farmiria (família), parntado (plantando) (20th century). From a historical perspective, this work is also important for a better methodological treatment of the corpora of poor writers.