It seems certain that, one day, Brazil will make the Brazilian language official, since time inevitably particularizes the language spoken in different lands, making idiomatic unity increasingly difficult. There are, in this, many plausible reasons and many mistakes. The first of these is the assumption that a language must have a “unity”, that is, it must be spoken in the same way unanimously. It is laughable to think that, if such a Brazilian language becomes official, it will not be susceptible to the same regional variations and the same evolutionary processes that all widely spoken languages have undergone and will undergo. One has to be very ignorant to suppose that some pens will guide the language spoken in the streets, when it is this that, ultimately, guides the grammars. Stupid measures like this latest orthographic agreement only make it more evident. On the other hand, it is understandable and even natural that a nation long for an authentic expression. But one must be very careful to distinguish to what extent this authenticity represents a necessary evolution, rather than a sudden break with the roots that allowed it to evolve.
Tag: languages
Future Note
I have the note ready, but I cannot write it yet… Oh, anxiety! Come, time! I can already imagine the pleasure, the joy in transcribing my frustration in these words: Russian is much, much easier than Latin! Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the original is fun compared to understanding Tacitus, Virgil, Ovid, etc., etc. Come on, time! I cannot wait for this publication! Just thinking about my Latin dictionary makes me want to tear it up, burn it, throw it away, eliminate it forever from my life. I can no longer stand this crutch, without which I cannot advance a paragraph in classical authors… And the Russian… what about the Russian? Let’s wait…
Wonders of This Century
It is a real wonder to be able to find, in a few clicks, from the end of the world, audios in dead languages pronounced according to the original speech. I think about the study of languages in past centuries. It is inevitable to see myself as privileged. For a long time I read English without knowing the correct pronunciation: a crass and compromising error—and I only understood it when I started reading poetry. In poetry, if one does not know the pronunciation, one does not understand contractions that may occur, sometimes the metrics seem confusing and, above all, one ignores the sounding of the verses which, in many cases, is fundamental. In The Raven, for example, pronounce open the closed tonic “o” that repeats itself closing all the stanzas of the poem, and the frowning effect, the idea and the feeling suggested by the phoneme are gone. Nevermore, nevermore, nothing more, nothing more… Here we already have an “r” which, in the English pronunciation, prolongs and amplifies the preceding vowel. From this the obvious conclusion: to understand the expressiveness of great poets, it is indispensable to know the phonetics of the language in which they composed. And, in this respect, the reader of this century only sins by neglect.
Orthographic Reforms
Reflecting superficially on the orthographic reforms that the Portuguese language has gone through, the impression is that the language has become uglier, poorer, and sometimes confusing. It is always a pity for any language when “authorities” sit down to regulate it. It is as if the work of grammarians, who progressively record the mutations that the language undergoes, has no value whatsoever. The pattern, whose evolution is the work of centuries, is suddenly broken: time is scratched, and a “right” and a “wrong” are established, with the naive hope that a living language can be tamed by conventions… The result is something that sounds unnatural. The consolation is to know that, although abounding in defects, Portuguese is strong enough to overcome these deliriums and nonsenses…