Evanildo Bechara launches book Masters of Language – 11/23/2023 – Thaís Nicoleti
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“It is us, it is Brazil who must make the law regarding its language, its taste, its art and its literature. This autonomy, which does not exclude the lesson of ancient and modern mastersis not only a right, but a duty.” Perhaps with the exception of the excerpt highlighted by the author himself, the thought could well integrate the discussions that are taking place today around the existence (or not) of a “Brazilian language”. Who wrote the lines above was the Ceará writer José de Alencar (1829-1877), who, in the 19th century, advocated the independence of Brazilian Portuguese, although he did not see another language in the Brazilian variant, a thesis today defended by some scholars.
The fragment above is part of a letter from the author of “Senhora” and “O Guarani” addressed to the editors of the magazine “Lusa” on November 20, 1874. The information appears in the article “José de Alencar and the language of Brazil”, by professor Evanildo Bechara, originally published in the magazine of the Instituto de Letras da UFF in 1978 and now republished by Nova Fronteira in the volume properly entitled “Mestres da Língua”.
The same Alencar, in his time criticized for the use of foreign words, responded to Joaquim Nabuco (1875) with these words: “The critic noticed the word grogof English origin, portuguese by me in groggy. I could notice others like tilbury, picnic, snack; or crochet It is champagne, from French. Since foreign terms are introduced into a country by necessity and become indispensable in civil relations, the language, which receives them into its vocabulary, reacts by a natural law on the etymological composition to imprint its own morphological character on it”. And it also brought examples of Portuguese terms used in other languages: “Foreign languages also corrupt, or rather, subject our Brazilian words to their mold. So the French changed guava into guava [‘goyave’]cashew in acajoucassava in manioc; and the same happens with other people about several American words”.
The reader interested in the topic of linguistic variation, naturally linked to the entry of foreign words into the language, will like to see it discussed in the second half of the 19th century by one of the authors who would become part of the canon of Brazilian literature. By the way, Professor Bechara’s compilation of texts is a fair tribute to the masters, whose reflections are certainly useful to scholars, but can also be read with curiosity by those uninitiated in the intricate issues of the language – see the “Linguistic Contributions of Filinto Elísio”, the 18th century Portuguese priest who invented words. The reader will learn, for example, that the term “tremeluzir” is his own.
He himself says that, when translating a Latin text, he came up with the dictionary’s suggestion “to shine with trembling light” to describe the meaning of a single word: “– I didn’t become a man, but mute and I began to imagine the alone with me: Well, I will have to replace the meaning of a single word with almost an entire verse!…”. Adept at synthesis, he dealt with the ball: “Come a verb composed of shake it’s from shine and two immediately came to the table, bouncing around in the imagination below: flickered It is lucitremeu“. We already know which of the two won. There are several other fun cases, which the reader will like to discover for themselves in the pages of the book.
Bechara tells us, in another article, that a teacher came to him to obtain an explanation about an expression that, used by Machado de Assis, was apparently never accepted by dictionaries. She was intrigued by the use of “zás que daras” (in chapter 21 of “Dom Casmurro”). The reader will know that “zás que daras” is an expressive word, started by the onomatopoeic term “zás” (which imitates the sound of a blow) and followed by a rhyming term. Thus, “que darras” would have no meaning of its own and, like “zás-trás” or “zás-catrás”, both registered, would extract its expressive value from the rhyme.
Anyone who imagines that the “lessons of the masters” echo antiquated or obsolete views of the linguistic phenomenon is mistaken. Among those honored in the collection are Eugenio Coseriu, Celso Cunha, Celso Luft, Mario Barreto and many others, who contributed with relevant reflections on the language. There is also Said Ali, who, having been Bechara’s own teacher, was one of the first scholars to raise issues still discussed today in linguistics, such as pronominal placement in Brazilian Portuguese.
In fact, this issue was also one of the concerns of Brazilian modernist writers. In Bechara’s collection, we see the discussion between Mario de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira, whose correspondence is commented on in the article “Manuel Bandeira and the Portuguese language”. We learn that Bandeira was an excellent Portuguese-style pronoun phraser and that Mario de Andrade was a fan of the unstressed pronoun at the beginning of a sentence without any type of restriction – anyone who has read “Amar: Verbo Intransitivo” knows that he used, in fact, this pronoun placement. The topic remains under discussion to this day, having been the subject of a recent systematization proposal by professors Carlos Alberto Faraco and Francisco Eduardo Vieira (“Gramática do Português Brasileiro Escrito”, Ed. Parábola).
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