Galician–Portuguese

Language

Origins and history

Galician–Portuguese developed in the region of the former Roman province of Gallaecia, from the Vulgar Latin (common Latin) that had been introduced by Roman soldiers, colonists and magistrates during the time of the Roman Empire. Although the process may have been slower than in other regions, the centuries of contact with Vulgar Latin, after a period of bilingualism, completely extinguished the native languages, leading to the evolution of a new variety of Latin with a few Gallaecian features.

Gallaecian and Lusitanian influences were absorbed into the local Vulgar Latin dialect, which can be detected in some Galician–Portuguese words as well as in placenames of Celtic and Iberian origin. In general, the more cultivated variety of Latin spoken by the Hispano-Roman elites in Roman Hispania had a peculiar regional accent, referred to as Hispano ore and agrestius pronuntians. The more cultivated variety of Latin coexisted with the popular variety. It is assumed that the Pre-Roman languages spoken by the native people, each used in a different region of Roman Hispania, contributed to the development of several different dialects of Vulgar Latin and that these diverged increasingly over time, eventually evolving into the early Romance languages of Iberia.

An early form of Galician–Portuguese was already spoken in the Kingdom of the Suebi and by the year 800 Galician–Portuguese had already become the vernacular of northwestern Iberia. The first known phonetic changes in Vulgar Latin, which began the evolution to Galician–Portuguese, took place during the rule of the Germanic groups, the Suebi (411–585) and Visigoths (585–711). Both the Galician–Portuguese "inflected infinitive" (or "personal infinitive") and the nasal vowels may have evolved under the influence of local Celtic languages (as in Old French). The nasal vowels would thus be a phonologic characteristic of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gallaecia, but they are not attested in writing until after the 6th and 7th centuries.

The oldest known document to contain Galician–Portuguese words found in northern Portugal is called the Doação à Igreja de Sozello and dated to 870 but otherwise composed in Late/Medieval Latin. Another document, from 882, also containing some Galician–Portuguese words is the Carta de dotação e fundação da Igreja de S. Miguel de Lardosa. In fact, many Latin documents written in Portuguese territory contain Romance forms. The Notícia de fiadores, written in 1175, is thought by some to be the oldest known document written in Galician–Portuguese. The Pacto dos irmãos Pais, discovered in 1999 (and possibly dating from before 1173), has been said to be even older, but despite the enthusiasm of some scholars, it has been shown that the documents are not really written in Galician–Portuguese but are in fact a mixture of Late Latin and Galician–Portuguese phonology, morphology and syntax. The Noticia de Torto, of uncertain date (c. 1214?), and the Testament of Afonso II (27 June 1214) are most certainly Galician–Portuguese. The earliest poetic texts (but not the manuscripts in which they are found) date from c. 1195 to c. 1225. Thus, by the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th there are documents in prose and verse written in the local Romance vernacular.

Literature

Galician–Portuguese had a special cultural role in the literature of the Christian kingdoms of Crown of Castile (Kingdoms of Castile, Leon and Galicia, part of the medieval NW Iberian Peninsula) comparable to the Catalan language of the Crown of Aragon (Principality of Catalonia and Kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Majorca, NE medieval Iberian Peninsula), or that of Occitan in France and Italy during the same historical period. The main extant sources of Galician–Portuguese lyric poetry are these:

The four extant manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (written under the patronage of, Alfonso X the Wise, king of Castile, Leon and Galicia from 1252–1284)

Cancioneiro da Ajuda

Cancioneiro da Vaticana

Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, also known as Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (Lisbon)

Cancioneiro dun Grande de Espanha

Pergaminho Vindel

Pergaminho Sharrer

Os 5 lais de Bretanha

Tenzón entre Afonso Sánchez e Vasco Martíns de Resende

The language was used for literary purposes from the final years of the 12th century to roughly the middle of the 14th century in what are now Spain and Portugal and was, almost without exception, the only language used for the composition of lyric poetry. Over 160 poets are recorded, among them Bernal de Bonaval, Pero da Ponte, Johan Garcia de Guilhade, Johan Airas de Santiago, and Pedr' Amigo de Sevilha. The main secular poetic genres were the cantigas d'amor (male-voiced love lyric), the cantigas d'amigo (female-voiced love lyric) and the cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer (including a variety of genres from personal invective to social satire, poetic parody and literary debate).

All told, nearly 1,700 poems survive in these three genres, and there is a corpus of over 400 cantigas de Santa Maria (narrative poems about miracles and hymns in honor of the Holy Virgin). The Castilian king Alfonso X composed his cantigas de Santa Maria and his cantigas de escárnio e maldizer in Galician–Portuguese, even though he used Castilian for prose.

Divergence

As a result of political division, Galician–Portuguese lost its unity when the County of Portugal separated from the Kingdom of Leon to establish the Kingdom of Portugal. The Galician and Portuguese versions of the language then diverged over time as they followed independent evolutionary paths.

As Portugal's territory was extended southward during the Reconquista, the increasingly-distinctive Portuguese language was adopted by the people in those regions, supplanting the earlier Arabic and other Romance/Latin languages that were spoken in these conquered areas during the Moorish era. Meanwhile, Galician was influenced by the neighbouring Leonese language, especially during the time of kingdoms of Leon and Leon-Castile, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, it has been influenced by Castilian. Two cities at the time of separation, Braga and Porto, were within the County of Portugal and have remained within Portugal. Further north, the cities of Lugo, A Coruña and the great medieval centre of Santiago de Compostela remained within Galicia.

Galician was the main written language in Galicia until the 16th century, but was later displaced by Castilian Spanish, which was the official language of the Crown of Castille. Galician slowly became mainly an oral language, preserved by the majority rural or "uneducated" population living in the villages and towns, and Castilian was taught as the "correct" language to the bilingual educated elite in the cities. During most of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, its written use was largely reduced to popular literature and theatre and private letters. From the 18th century onward, the interest for the language grew by the studies of illustrious writers such as Martin Sarmiento, who studied the evolution of Galician from Latin and prepared the foundations for the first dictionary of Galician, José Cornide, and father Sobreira. In the 19th century, a true literature in Galician emerged during the Rexurdimento, followed by the appearance of journals and, in the 20th century, scientific publications. Because until comparatively recently, most Galicians lived in many small towns and villages in a relatively remote and mountainous land, the language changed very slowly and was only very slightly influenced from outside the region. That situation made Galician remain the vernacular of Galicia until the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its most spoken language until the early 21st century. The draft of the 1936 Galician Statute of Autonomy considered an official status for (Modern) Galician in the region, but it never came into force, as Galicia fell to rebel control upon the early stages of the Spanish Civil War.

Phonology

1 In Galician and European Portuguese, voiced stops may become allophonically and intervocally approximants [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞]. However, this does not happen in Portuguese dialects from Brazil, Africa and Asia.

2 /β/ eventually shifted to /v/ in central and southern Portugal and merged with /b/ in northern Portugal and Galicia.

3 In most Brazilian dialects, t and d are palatalized to [tʃ] and [dʒ] before [i,ĩ] (e.g. tio [tʃi.u]). This includes cases where the [i,ĩ] results from epenthesis, such as when [i] is inserted after plosives that close syllables or words (e.g. atmosfera [a.tʃi.mos.fe.ra]), and in cases of word-final vowel raising when [e] becomes [i] (e.g. pedinte [pe.dʒĩ.tʃi]).

4 /s/ ⟨s-, -ss-⟩ and /z/ ⟨-s-⟩ were apico-alveolar [s̺, z̺], and /ts/ ⟨ç⟩ and /dz/ ⟨z⟩ were lamino-alveolar [t͡s̻, d͡z̻]. Later, all the affricate sibilants became fricatives [s̻, z̻], with the apico-alveolar and lamino-alveolar sibilants remaining distinct for a time but eventually merging in most dialects in different ways.

In Portuguese, lamino-alveolar sibilants [s̻] ⟨ç⟩ and [z̻] ⟨z⟩ merged into their respective apico-alveolars [s̺] ⟨s-, -ss-⟩ and [z̺] ⟨-s-⟩, contrasting only their voices [s, z].

In Galician, on the other hand (and just like in Peninsular Spanish), lamino-alveolar sibilants [s̻] ⟨ç⟩ and [z̻] ⟨z⟩ merged into a dental [θ], while apico-alveolar sibilants [s̺] ⟨s-, -ss-⟩ and [z̺] ⟨-s-⟩ merged into a sibilant [s̺], contrasting their sibilancy [s̺, θ]. In some regional varieties of Galician, however, sibilants may merge partially or totally into [s̺].

See History of Portuguese for more information.

5 In most Portuguese dialects, /r/ became a guttural consonant: a uvular in Portugal [ʀ, ʁ] and in Brazil its specter is wider [x, χ, h]. On the other hand, it is preserved as a trill [r] in many rural areas of Portugal, in several regions of Africa and Asia, and in Galician.

Sample text

Here is a sample of Galician-Portuguese lyric:

Oral traditions

There has been a sharing of folklore in the Galician–Portuguese region going back to prehistoric times. As the Galician–Portuguese language spread south with the Reconquista, supplanting Mozarabic, this ancient sharing of folklore intensified. In 2005, the governments of Portugal and Spain jointly proposed that Galician–Portuguese oral traditions be made part of the Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The work of documenting and transmitting that common culture involves several universities and other organizations.

Galician–Portuguese folklore is rich in oral traditions. These include the cantigas ao desafio or regueifas, duels of improvised songs, many legends, stories, poems, romances, folk songs, sayings and riddles, and ways of speech that still retain a lexical, phonetic, morphological and syntactic similarity.

Also part of the common heritage of oral traditions are the markets and festivals of patron saints and processions, religious celebrations such as the magosto, entroido or Corpus Christi, with ancient dances and tradition – like the one where Coca the dragon fights with Saint George; and also traditional clothing and adornments, crafts and skills, work-tools, carved vegetable lanterns, superstitions, traditional knowledge about plants and animals. All these are part of a common heritage considered in danger of extinction as the traditional way of living is replaced by modern life, and the jargon of fisherman, the names of tools in traditional crafts, and the oral traditions which form part of celebrations are slowly forgotten.

A Galician–Portuguese "baixo-limiao" tongue is spoken in several villages. In Galicia, it is spoken in Entrimo and Lobios and in northern Portugal in Terras de Bouro (lands of the Buri) and Castro Laboreiro including the mountain town (county seat) of Soajo and surrounding villages.