A philological view at the punctuation system in the 18th and 21st centuries and their contributions to the teaching of Portuguese Language nowadays

Abstract

The presented article addresses the importance of studying punctuation in the Portuguese language, which is often neglected in comparison with other grammatical areas. It is believed that, to teach about punctuation, is necessary to have knowledge about the history of the Portuguese language and the changes that it has undergone over the years. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the study of punctuation in the Portuguese language, through the analysis of a corpus of manuscript texts from the 18th century, which belong to the Public Archive of the State of Mato Grosso. Quali-quantitative methodology was applied, selecting excerpts from the documents that represent the punctuation system used at that time. For the comparison of grammatical norms, this article presented the norms in force in the 18th century written by Feijó (1734) and in the 21st century written by Cegalla (2008). We conclude that the study of punctuation is relevant for understanding the Portuguese language and its changing over time, and that knowledge of the history of the language should not be dissociated from the teaching practices of elementary education. In addition, we reflect on the need to propose a philological didactics sequences that can provide students with observational and comparatives exercises of the past writing practices with the current ones.