Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/762

 742 PORTUGAL (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) fluent than the Spanish. Sismondi felicitously called it " a boneless Oastilian." The Spaniards call it a language of flowers ; and a modern Portuguese writer, Francisco Dias, styles it the eldest daughter of the Latin, while it is called by Hallara the soft and voluptuous dialect. The pronunciation partakes of the character both of the French and of the Spanish, and is very difficult for foreigners ; but it is unobstructed by those gutturals and harsh aspirates which the Spanish inherited from the Arabic. There are in Portuguese five double consonants, called prolacdes : ch, like the English sh, save in words of Greek origin, where it is sounded as ~k; Ih (liquid I), like li in Julia; nh, cor- responding to the French liquid gn, and the English ni in pinion ; ph, as in the English ; and rr, occurring only between vowels, and having a stronger and rougher sound than the single r, but not the aspiration characteristic of the Spanish rr. The j is mostly pronounced as in French (zti), as is also the g when fol- lowed by e or i. before e or i, and p before a, o, or u, have the hard sound of s. S between two vowels has the soft sound of z. X has four sounds: that of the English sh, as in paixao, passion ; that of s hard, as in extendo, extending, duplex, duplex ; that of z, as in ex- acto, exact ; and that of the English x, as in sexo, sex, convexo, convex. Final z has the hissing sound of s, as in perdiz, partridge. Among the vowels, the e is remarkable as hav- ing three sounds, two of which correspond re- spectively to the long and short sounds of the Spanish e, while the third partakes of the na- ture of the so-called mute e of the French. The o has likewise a long and a short sound, resem- bling those of the same vowel in English. The most remarkable features of Portuguese orthog- raphy and orthoepy are the five nasal vowels a, 2, 1, d, ft, (of which, however, only a and are now commonly used in writing), sometimes also written without the tilde (~) when it is replaced by m or n after the vowel. But in these combinations, which are respectively pro- nounced nearly as the English ang, eng, ing, owng, oong, the vowels do not lose, as in the corresponding French combinations, their own natural sound. In such words as s&da and t8po, the tilde marks the omission of the letters n (sonda) and in (tempo). There are but two written accents, the circumflex ( A ) and the acute ('). The grammar, resembling those of the Spanish and French, is in general sim- ple, the only peculiarity requiring particular notice being the inflections of the infinitive mood of the verb, which, besides the ordi- nary impersonal form, has a personal form governed by a noun or pronoun : thus, amar, to love ; o eu amar, I to love, or my loving ; o tu amares, thou to love, or thy loving. The Latin words which form the basis of the Por- tuguese have in some instances undergone greater changes than in any other modern tongue. Some radical letters are almost always omitted, the consonants I and n being most frequently dropped : thus, Lat. dolor, Port. dor; Lat. ponere, Port, par; Lat. populus, Port, povo ; Lat. ille, ilia, Port, o, a; Lat. pater, Port, pai or pae. But many Latin words have been retained literally, and others have suffered only a slight alteration ; asforca from furca, goloso from gulosus, ouro from aurum, digo from dico, amigo from amicus, chamar from clamare, peito from pectus, &c. Of Por- tuguese grammars may be mentioned Constan- cio's Orammatica analytica da lingua portu- gueza (Paris, 1831), and Nowvelle grammaire portugaise (1832) ; Vieyra's " Grammar of the Portuguese Language " (13th ed., revised by Henriquez, London, 1869) ; andGrauert's " New Method for Learning the Portuguese Lan- guage" (New York, 1863). There are diction- aries by Da Costa and Sa (Portuguese, French, and Latin, Lisbon, 1794), Da Gunha (French and Portuguese, Lisbon, 1811), Vieyra (English and Portuguese, new ed., Lisbon, 1860), and Jose de Lacerda (Portuguese-English and Eng- lish-Portuguese, Lisbon, 1866). Portuguese lit- erature comprises few works of any note ex- cept poems and histories. The earliest compo- sitions on record are contained in a collection of lyrical poems in the amatory style of the troubadours, preserved in the college of no- bles in Lisbon, of which 25 copies were pub- lished by Lord Stuart of Rothesay (Paris, 1823). These ancient songs, some of which are transla- tions from Provencal, are referred to the be- ginning of the 13th century. But Bouterwek mentions fragments from poets of the 12th cen- tury, Goncalo Henriques and Egaz Moniz Ooe- Iho, courtiers of Alfonso I. During the 13th and 14th centuries the poetic art was fostered by several princes, such as King Dionysius, his natural son Alfonso Sanches, Alfonso IV., Pe- dro I., and the infante Dom Pedro, son of John I. and author of some amatory poems, included in Resende's Cancioneiro (1516). At the same time the romances of chivalry had been diligently cultivated, especially by Vasco de Lobeira, the reputed author of u Amadis de Gaul," derived, as some have thought, but upon insufficient evidence, from a French met- rical composition. During the 15th century, which has been called the heroic age of Por- tugal, prose compositions became both numer- ous and important. Fernando Lopez, the Portuguese Froissart, Gomez Eannes de Azu- rara, another chronicler, and Alfonso V., who wrote a treatise on the art of war and a little work on astronomy, are among the most note- worthy names of this period. King Edward (died 1438) composed a treatise De Bono Ee- gimine Justitice ; and Damiao de Goes is known as the author of De Moribus ^ihiopum and a chronicle of King Emanuel. Among the few specimens of noble prose in the Portuguese language, one of the earliest is the Menina e Mo fa of Ribeiro, a pastoral romance in a chaste and pleasing style, much of the charm of which, however, is marred by obscure allusions to events in the author's life. Ribeiro was also