Fair VENUS holds up the contrary Theam

Affected to the Lusitanian-Nation,

For the much likeness she observ’d in Them

To her old ROME, for which she had such passion,

In their great hearts, in the propitious beam

Of their to-AFFRICK-fatal constellation,

And in the charming musick of their Tongue,

Which she thinks Latine with small dross among.

——, Luís de Camões, The Lusíads (1572).[1]

Introduction

The quote above comes from Luís de Camões’s poem The Lusíads (1572) in which Venus, one of the ancient Roman goddesses, speaks to the Portuguese people and tells them that they are the new Romans due to their bravery. In fact, they could be easily mistaken for Romans because the language they speak is essentially

‘Latine with a small dross’.

There exists in our modern world, by all accounts, 230 million native speakers of this Latin ‘with small dross’, or Portuguese, along with an estimated 20 million extra people who speak it as a second language. It is a global language; a description fitting for the language of the first European nation to carve out an empire on which the sun never set.

It is a fairly old language as well. Anyone who embarks on a study of historic world literature must surely come across the aforementioned Luís de Camões, who told the heroic tale of Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India on the high seas. Other high profile names might include Lisbon’s favourite Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Camillo Castelo Branco (1825–90), Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) or, from Brazil, the likes of José de Alencar (1829–77) or Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909).

That many illustrious Portuguese literary works appeared in the late medieval and modern periods is a fact but then the more curious reader might be prompted to ask further questions:

• When did the Portuguese language first come into existence?
• Was it when the word ‘Portuguese’ first appeared in print during the late medieval period?
• Or did it come into being at that period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula and the beginning of the medieval era?

In short, at what date should the birth of a language be ascribed? Such are the questions with which Marco Neves, in his new book titled History of Portuguese since the Big Bang (2021) (História do português desde o Big Bang) seeks to grapple. And the answer to those questions is much more complex than I originally thought.

What follows here is not so much a review of Marco Neves’s book (for I think it is very good) but rather, because there is not as yet an English translation of it, a summary of its main points for the benefit of those who are interested in learning how a language is born (regardless of which language that be) and also anyone interested in the history of the Portuguese nation more broadly.

Professor Marco Neves

Marco Neves, a university professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, blogger, translator, editor, public speaker, and author (and is also active on social media, boasting highly interesting TikTok and YouTube channels), is the author of several academic works pertaining to the study of the Portuguese language. Neves is evidently acquainted with some of the best literary works of the English language. Indeed, as he tells us in the second chapter of his book,

Confesso uma inspiração para esta ideia numa obra de um clérigo anglicano, a escrever no século XVIII … A obra de que falo é Tristram Shandy, de Laurence Sterne, em que Tristram, o narrador, quer contar a sua vida e, para isso, começa antes do seu nascimento.

‘I confess inspiration for this idea [came] from [the] work of an Anglican clergyman, writing in the eighteenth century … The work of which I speak is Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne, in which Tristram, the narrator, wishes to tell his life and, because of this, begins before his birth’ (Translation my own).[2]

Just like Tristram tells the story of his life and describes the moment of his conception in the marriage bed (before he was but a sperm), so too will Neves tell us the history of the Portuguese language, which Neves playfully invites us to imagine had its moment of inception at the Big Bang. All languages spoken today had their origins in the Big Bang, for that is the event which gave rise to evolution, which in turn enabled our ape-like ancestors to develop the biological tools for speech, which then were used by the homo erectus and homo sapiens to develop words and fully-fledged languages, and which were then developed by later humans.

Portuguese as Spoken by the Homo Erectus

Thus, while the ‘Big Bang’ starting point may raise eyebrows among some linguists and historians out there, it nicely illustrates the difficulties in answering one of the key questions which Neves raises, namely: the difficulty of dating, precisely, the emergence of Portuguese as a distinct language. In short, starting any history of the Portuguese language later than the Big Bang would be akin to a biographer writing a biography of someone and starting the book when the subject was in adolescence and completely neglecting their birth.

But—I hear you say—early humans did not speak Portuguese (or English or Spanish or French or Arabic, for that matter). It is true that we do not know what the first language spoken by early humans exactly was or indeed how it arose. Neves has a hypothesis on this latter point, however:

Como surgiu a linguagem humana? Deixo aqui uma hipótese: a partir de sons que usávamos em certas situações de forma instintiva ou na imitação de animais, passámos a conseguir desligar o símbolo do seu significado, ou seja, símbolos sempre que necessãrio. Imaginemos um group de seres humanos, na savana, a caçar. Um deles vê, à frente, uma gazela. Habitualmente, usam um som dito em surdina, para que todos reparem. Com o tempo, encontram vários sons para diferentes animais. Estamos perante sinais, que vão sendo aprendidos pelas novas gerações. Estes sinais, a certa altura, começam a ser usados noutros contextos, para “conversar” sobre os animais. Nascem as palavras.

How did human language arise? I leave here an hypothesis: from the sounds that we used in certain situations, out of instinct or in the imitation of animals, we were able to take away a symbol from its meaning [and] create [from these] symbols whenever necessary. Let’s imagine a group of human beings hunting in the savannah. One of them sees in front of him a dear. Habitually, they use a quietly spoken sound [to describe this] so that everyone notices. With the passage of time, the group find different sounds for different animals. We are facing sounds which then go on being learnt by different generations. These signs, at a certain point, begin to be used in other contexts, in order to ‘converse’ about animals. Thus words were born (55; translation my own).

We know that languages, with their own grammatical structures, were in existence at least 40,000 years ago and there are indications that a kind of language (the use of sounds to create meaning) was in use even among the homo erectus(c. 2,000,000 years ago) for, in the words of Dieter Hillert, writing in the journal Lingua, homo erectus’ brains were ‘equipped with a computational capacity for premodern language’.[3] The language which the homo erectus spoke contained the germs of Portuguese (and other languages) which these early ‘human’ languages would morph into.

Changes in Language

But why did the language not stay static? Neves asks us again to imagine the same tribe which chose sounds to signify certain animals or actions. Even though all members of the tribe may strive to imitate the same sound for a particular thing, the reproduction of that sound in every mouth from every tongue will be always be slightly different. This is a fact of biology (71).

Members of the same group will, additionally, seek to save time in the pronunciation of their words while still being understood (much as Brits save time and effort today in the pronunciation of certain words like ‘water’, often neglecting the /t/). Some sounds will change when joined closely with other sounds to form a sentence with several words. After this, new generations of children grow up learning these imperfectly pronounced sounds, and they repeat the ‘imperfections’. Now imagine, if you will, multiple tribes of these early humans, in various locations, whose speech is undergoing all these processes as well—now we have many languages and multiple opportunities for variation (60–63).

Bear in mind that these early hunter societies were oral societies and that, when a language is only spoken, change can be rapid. Only when a society develops writing do changes de-accelerate (72). Nevertheless,

A nossa língua é descendente em linha directa da língua de algum caçador antigo. Muitas das características do Português decorrerão ainda das características dessa língua–por exemplo, termos a tendência para pôr o verbo a seguir ao sujeito … pode muito bem ser resultado da maneira como uma tribo particular, há muitos milhares de anos, construía as suas frases, ao contrário do que acontecia na tribo mais próxima.

Our language [Portuguese] is descended in a direct line from the language of some ancient hunter. Many of the characteristics of Portuguese derives from characteristics of this ancient language—for example, we have the tendency to place the verb following the subject … [and this] could be the result of the manner in which, millions of years ago, one particular tribe would construct their phrases, which would be different to what happened in one of the nearest tribes (73; translation my own).

These early humans were nomadic; they took their ever-changing language with them to many places and they came into contact with other tribes with whom they might exchange words. Languages only became ‘fixed’ to places approximately 12,000 years ago, when humans began to farm, and thus a particular language became attached with a certain group of people who were more or less permanently settled in one area (76).

Now, then, we come to the beginnings of more familiar territory—the languages which we associate with a particular place now have a chance to take root. Some tribes, settled in a particular place, became dominant through conquest and so did their language, which might merge somewhat with the language of the conquered people (and now we have more variation). At other times, when foreigners moved near a dominant tribe, it suited the strangers to begin speaking the dominant language. In these strangers’ mouths, too, would the dominant language undergo alterations.

‘With a little corruption…’ / ‘Com pouca corrupção’

In the first canto of Camões’s epic, Venus appears and says that she favours the brave Portuguese explorers because in their hearts can be found the true spirit of the Romans. Indeed, the language which the explorers speak could, Venus admits, be mistaken for Latin—the language of the Romans—but ‘with a little corruption’ or ‘Com pouca corrupção’ (87; translation my own). Venus’s remarks would accord with the sentiments of most modern people who, were they asked what the ancestor of the Portuguese language was, would likely respond with Latin.

People who answered with Latin would not be wrong; it is a direct ancestor of modern Portuguese. But it is a very recent ancestor and one of many. We cannot simply jump from hunter gatherers, to early farmers, all the way in time to the Roman Empire. If we want to learn the history of Portuguese from its birth, we need the story of its adolescence. So, what language was spoken before Latin?

The answer to the above was determined by a British man, Sir William Jones (1746–94), a colonial official in British India who, having noted the similarities between three ancient languages—Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek—posited the existence of Proto-Indo European (PIE). Jones was on the money—his research enabled the reconstruction of a language spoken more than 6,500 years ago (93). Remarkably accurate, it is in Jones’s PIE that we find the beginnings of a language which we can see would one day develop into Portuguese. Take, for example, the word ‘three’ in Portuguese and its PIE equivalent.

[Portuguese] Três | *Tréyes [Proto-Indo European]

A relatively stable form of PIE was spoken for at least 2,000 years before it began to diverge into other languages. In Europe, PIE devolved into proto-Celtic and proto-Italic (97). Small differences between these developed; these became large differences; and eventually speakers of these subsets of different languages became incomprehensible to each other.

Imperial languages

Two of these languages which developed from PIE were of course Ancient Greek and Latin, the languages of the two successively dominant civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world. The rise of the Roman Empire, and its subsuming of Greek speaking territories, is a well-told tale and need not be repeated here. What is important for our purposes is the fact that Latin became the prestige language of the Roman Empire.

Julius Caesar arrived in what is now Portugal in the first century BC and fought his way down to the Douro Valley. After forty years of ‘pacification’ the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was largely complete and four centuries of cultural and intellectual Romanisation of its peoples began. The old Celtic language of the people was gradually replaced with Latin as the official language of the region.[4]

As the empire grew, then declined, and then fell, regional variations in the spoken Latin language appeared (the written form remained relatively stable and its use continued by the Church, of course, but in an age when a majority of the population did not write, its written form mattered little in people’s daily activities). And regional variations appeared in Portugal as well. These were the ‘corruptions’ of which Venus spoke in the Lusíads.

Let us imagine, then, that we are living in ‘Portugal’ or Lusitania as the Romans called it, maybe a hundred years after 476 AD (the fall of the Western Roman Empire) and we are living under the sway of the Visigoths. Latin is still the language of the Church, but we cannot read or write and our spoken Latin has been subjected to many variations and corruptions. What language are we speaking? As a Lusitanian, I might self-identify as a Latin speaker, but the Latin I speak will be much different to that spoken by the Romano-British in Britannia during the same period.

At this point, do we say that Portuguese was ‘born’? It’s still not so simple:

É verdade que as línguas neolatinas são bem diferentes do latim, mas nunca houve um momento em que se pudesse dizer: o latim morreu e nasceu o português.

It’s true that neo-Latin languages are very different from Latin, but there was never a moment at which it could be said: Latin died and Portuguese was born (106; translation my own).

If I be a merchant who needs to travel to other territories that were once part of the Roman Empire, there’s a good chance that even with the variated way I speak I might be understood by other ‘Latin’ speakers, but the language I speak is both different and the same. Certainly by the time of the Moorish conquests of Iberia—in which spoken Latin remained the language of the streets while Arabic became the ‘prestige language’ of the ruling class—and the influence of those people upon my spoken language during the 700s and 800s, my ‘Latin’ language (for I do not yet call it Portuguese) is now so different that were I to travel from my home in Douro Valley to Italy for the purposes of trading, I might now need an interpreter (129).

Even though I may not speak the language of my Moorish rulers, some of their words may have crept into my own as, in the words of historian David Birmingham,

‘[while] the vernacular language remained Latinised, technical terms for plants and tools, weights and measures, carts and harnesses were borrowed from Arabic’.[5]

Even today, a modern Portuguese person uses many words beginning with al-, such as almoçar (to lunch) and the ‘al’ is very much an Arabic addition to this Latin language. Even the written ‘Latin’ language of southern Iberia will not be free from ‘errors’; one only has to look at the Foundation Charter of the Church at Lardosa, written in 882, to discern these ‘mistakes’. To give one very brief example from the text:

Et uia moastica obtinuerint in ipso loco sibe pro luminaria altariorum.

The moastica should be ‘monastica’ were this text to be written in ‘true’ medieval Latin (135).

After the Reconquista

When the Moors conquered Iberia, they left a small Christian and ‘Latin’-speaking enclave in the north of the peninsula. The language spoken in this territory is today given the name of Galician. It was, initially, perhaps freer from Moorish influences than the Latin language of the southern peninsula. But, as the successive Kingdoms of Leon, Castille, and Aragon pushed back the Moorish invaders over the next couple of hundred years, Galician became fused with the Latin-with-Arabic-characteristics which was spoken in the southern part of Portugal. By 1143, therefore, the language spoken in this region of the world was ‘Galician-Portuguese’.

Is it here that modern Portuguese was born? Certainly any history of Portuguese must take this into account but Galician-Portuguese is neither fully Portuguese nor is it simply Galician. The first text written in what is distinctly Portuguese (as distinct from its Galician-Portuguese) appeared by the 1170s with the Pacto dos Irmãos Pais (c.1173–74) and the Notícias de Fiadores (1175). Yet the existence of these documents do not reflect the moment of the language’s birth. The documents are instead a reflection of the fact that this form of the language—which, we recall, even its speakers don’t yet call Portuguese—was already being spoken on the streets and had crept into the realm of officialdom (137).

Geography matters in the development of any language and when, subsequently, Dom Afonso Henriques established the frontiers of the new Kingdom of Portugal. This Latin with a few corruptions became associated with the new small kingdom centred on Porto which later pushed south and gained the key cities of Coimbra and Lisbon, the latter becoming its capital in 1256. By this time, this language—for which we still have no name—was the dominant language of a more or less unified kingdom.

The Arrival of Portuguese?

It was not considered necessary, during these early years of the Kingdom of Portugal, to declare an official language. Latin was still the language of literature (for those who could write but who were very few in number). For the majority of the population, the ‘Latin with many errors and some Arabic’ was the language which they needed to speak in their daily lives. It continued to be subjected to many alterations. This particular form of speaking Latin came to be associated with the Portuguese people and their nation and what better name for it later to be called than ‘Portuguese’?

Thus, we now have a recognisable Portuguese language spoken by a people who would be identified, due to their national boundaries, as Portuguese. But it was not until 1430 that the first written reference to Portuguese, as a distinct language from Latin, appeared. In that year, Prince Dom Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, published his translation of Cicero’s De Officiis into Portuguese. In the preface, dedicated to his brother Dom Duarte, he wrote that Cicero’s works were so excellent for the inculcation of virtue that:

Mas assy parecia a alguus outros a que eu liia em portugues alguus seos capítulos, em tanto que per elles alguas vee[ses] fuy requerido que tornasse este livro em esta linguagem (149).

[Modern Portuguese] Mas também parecia a alguns outros a quem eu lia em português alguns capítulos seus, tanto que fui por eles solicitado algumas vezes a verter este livro à nossa língua.[6]

[In English] But it appeared thus to some others, to whom I read in Portuguese some of his chapters, that I was much solicited by them sometimes to turn this book into our language (translation my own).

Thus we have arrived at a point where these small differences in the spoken Latin language of Southern Iberia have carried on growing to the point that they constitute an effectively new language. It is a language that is even now being used by royalty. The small differences which began even before the Fall of the Roman Empire were the embryos of this new language.

Yet 1430 does not mark the birth date of Portuguese, for, as we have seen, the fact that people were already speaking the Portuguese of Dom Pedro when he translated it also means that it was already in existence.

The Quest for Linguistic Uniformity

Shortly after the time at which Dom Pedro translated Cicero into Portuguese do we also find the first Portuguese dictionaries and grammar books appearing, laying down rules as to how this language—a messy and convoluted Latin—should be spoken and written by the Portuguese people. However, the appearance of these linguistic rule books should not be mistaken, however, for the emergence of a sudden uniformity in this spoken and written Portuguese language. There was a ‘prestige’ form of Portuguese associated with the royal court and there was still the language of the streets, spoken by commoners.

Uniformity was, therefore, a much later development and only proceeded in tandem with the consolidation of the modern Portuguese state, when the idea of Portugal as a nation state emerged, especially after the breakup of the Iberian union and the country’s independence from Spain in the seventeenth century. After this, national artists and writers helped to promote the prestige language. Schools then enforced and further promoted the national language.

Uniformity occurred to a greater degree in the written language than in the spoken language. Even then, due to the fact that much of Portugal remained a peasant economy with an oral culture well into the 1950s, linguistic uniformity was never fully achieved.

Becoming Brazilian

Even in the twenty-first century, as Portugal’s former imperial possession, Brazil, exerts much cultural sway over the smaller ‘mother’ country’s culture, variations in its spoken and written forms will be found.

It is a common complaint from some of Portugal’s more conservative commentators that their youth are becoming more Brazilian. The likelihood is that the Portuguese youths who are listening to the latest Brazilian sertanejo songs are not becoming more ‘Brazilian’ but rather they know when to ‘code switch’, as it were. They have inside their heads the prestige Portuguese language as well as the Brazilian form. The use of either kind will be depend on the situations in which they find themselves.

We as individuals even have several forms of our native language within us, which use varies according to the situation we are in (205). Even in English does this be the case. We would speak differently, in a different tone, minding our ‘Ps and Qs’ (as we say with regard to English) when talking with a policeman. Many people have a telephone accent. We speak to our friends in a much different way when if talking to our professor.

Nevertheless, almost everyone in a given country that believes that ‘prestige’ language is the ‘correct’ form of language and, at times, if we do not adhere to the supposedly correct form of language we are judged by others as being a bit dim. There is now much more uniformity than existed in the sixteenth century, however, and, as Neves hypothesises, were the author of the Lusíads to arrive in modern-day Lisbon, he would be surprised by anyone who asserted that there is a national ‘standard’ language which everyone was socially coerced to speak.

Conclusion

Marco Neves is not suggesting that, at the moment of the Big Bang, Portuguese speakers appeared. His intention was to give a history of the Portuguese language from its ‘birth’ to its death. Yet, as all historians must, Neves had to start prior to the main event.

A historian of the French Revolution might begin their book, not on 5 May 1789—when Louis XVI convened the Estates General—but might look first to French participation in the American War of Independence (when France helped the Thirteen Colonies win their fight against Britain and nearly bankrupted themselves in the process) and thence to France’s loss of a significant chunk of their North American territories during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).

Yet how to find the antecedents of the language which we know today as Portuguese is difficult when, as Neves reminds us, there is no moment which we can pinpoint and say: This was the birth of the Portuguese language. To fully know its history, we must start at the very beginning, the moment of the inception of all languages. In such a case, one could justifiably start at the Big Bang.

References

[1] Richard Fanshawe, The Lusiad, or, Portugals historicall poem written in the Portingall language by Luis de Camoens (London: Humphrey Mosely, 1655), 1. 33. However, in Luís de Camões, The Lusíads, Trans. Landeg White (Oxford World Classics, 2001), 1.33, White translates this verse thus:

Arms are my theme, and those matchless heroes

Who from Portugal’s far western shores

By oceans where none had ventured

Voyaged to Taprobana and beyond,

Enduring hazards and assaults

Such as drew on more than human prowess

Among far distant peoples, to proclaim

A New Age, and win undying fame

[2] Marco Neves, A História do português desde o Big Bang (Lisbon: Guerra e Paz, 2021), 46. Further references to Neves’s book appear in parentheses throughout the text.

[3] Dieter Hillert [online], ‘How did language evolve in the lineage of higher primates’, Lingua, 264 (2021), accessed 29 March 2023, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024384121001303

[4] David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal, 3^rd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 12.

[5] Birmingham, 17.

[6] Modern Portuguese given by Mauri Furlan, ‘Dedicatória de sua tradução do Livro dos Ofícios (ca. 1438)’.