What of the effect of this milieu and this racial blend upon the nation’s tongue and its creative output? The Brazilian is by nature melancholy, for melancholy is an attribute of each of the three streams that flow in his blood. The peculiar, haunting sadness of the Portuguese lyric muse is summed up in their untranslatable word “saudade”;[10] both the conquered native and the subjected black are sad, the first through the bepuzzled contact with superior natural forces, the second through the wretchedness of his economic position. It has been recognized that the climate of Brazil has resulted in a lyrism sweeter, softer and more passionate than that of the Portuguese. “Our language,” says Romero, “is more musical and eloquent, our imagination more opulent.” So, too, De Carvalho: “Brazilian prosody has more delicate accents than the Portuguese and numerous interesting peculiarities.”
In the matter of linguistic modification, as of racial blend and national psychology, we of the North have problems similar to those of the Brazilians,—problems often enough obscured by unscientific, sentimental fixations or political dogma. The simple fact is that life, in language as in biology, is change. Whether we are concerned with the evolution of English in the United States, of Spanish in the cluster of Spanish-American republics, or of Portuguese in Brazil, change is the inevitable law. For the Spanish of Spanish-America, Remy de Gourmont, with his insatiable appetite for novelty, originated the term neo-Spanish. It met with much opposition from the purists, yet it recognizes the ineluctable course of speech. The noted Colombian philologist Rufino Cuervo, in a controversy with the genial conservative Valera, voiced his belief that the Spanish of the new world would grow more and more unlike the parent tongue.[11] In the same spirit, if with most unacademic hilariousness, Mencken has, in The American Language,[12] indicated the lines of cleavage between English and “American.” Brazilian scholars have naturally assumed a similar attitude toward their own language and have, likewise, met with the opposition of the purists. It does not matter, for the purpose of the present discussion, whether the linguistic cleavage in any of the instances here given will eventually prove so definite as to originate new tongues. Such an outcome is far less probable today than it was, say, in the epoch when Latin, through its vulgar form, was breaking up into the Romance languages. Widespread education and the printing press are conserving influences, acting as a check upon capricious modification.
One of the soundest and most sensible documents upon the Portuguese language in Brazil comes from the pen of the admirable critic José Verissimo.[13] “As a matter of fact,” he writes, “save perhaps in the really Portuguese period of our literature, which merely reproduced in an inferior fashion the ideas, the composition, the style and the language of the Portuguese (already entered upon its decadence), authors never wrote in Brazil as in Portugal; the masters of language abroad never had disciples here to rival them or even emulate them.… It would be a pure absurdity, then, to expect the Brazilian, the North American or the Spanish-American to write the classic tongue of his mother country.”
Chaucer wrote “It am I” where we would say “It is I” and where current colloquial usage, perhaps foreshadowing the accepted standard of tomorrow, says “It’s me.” English changes in England; why shall it cease to change in the United States? And justly, Verissimo asks a similar question for Brazil. “I have always felt,” he remarks somewhat farther on, “that the Portuguese tongue never attained the discipline and the relative grammatical and lexical fixity that other languages arrived at. I do not believe that among cultured tongues there is one that has given rise to so many controversial cases, or to so many and so diverse contradictions among its leading writers.” The fight about the collocation of personal pronouns is waged so earnestly in Brazil that it has become as funny, in some of its aspects, as the quarrel of the “lo-istas” and the “le-istas” in Spain. And so true are Verissimo’s words that as late as March, 1921, a writer could complain in the Revista do Brazil[14] that “we are at the very height of linguistic bolshevism”; the very next month, indeed, the editorial board of the same representative intellectual organ found it necessary to comment upon the various systems of orthography employed by its contributors and to designate a choice.[15] Verissimo, in accordance with A. H. Sayce, takes as his standard of grammatical correctness that which is “accepted by the great body of those who speak a language, not what is laid down by a grammarian.” Still more to the point, Verissimo, who was a man of exemplary honesty and fearlessness in a milieu that easily tempts to flattery and the other social amenities, declares that “if we are by language Portuguese, if through that tongue our literature is but a branch of the Portuguese, we have already almost ceased to be such … because of our fund of ideas and notions, which were all constituted outside of Portuguese influence.” The important thing, then, is “to have something to say, an idea to express, a thought to transmit. Without this, however deep his grammatical knowledge of the language, however perfectly he apes the classics, no man is a writer.” Platitudinous, perhaps, but how often some platitudes bear repetition!
The language of Brazil, then, is not the Portuguese of Lisbon. From the phonological viewpoint there is less palatalization of the final s and z than is customary in Portugal; Brazil has a real diphthong ou, which in Lisbonese has become a close o or the diphthong oi. Its pronunciation of the diphthong ei is true, whereas in Lisbon this approximates to ai (with a as in English above, or like the u of cut). Neither is the grammar identical with that of Portugal. “The truth is, that by correcting ourselves we run the danger of mutilating ideas and sentiments that are not merely personal. It is no longer the language that we are purifying; it is our spirit that we are subjecting to inexplicable servility. To speak differently is not to speak incorrectly.… To change a word or an inflexion of ours for a different one of Coimbra[16] is to alter the value of both in favor of artificial and deceptive uniformity.”[17]
Brazilianisms, so-called, make their appearance very early; they are already present in the letters sent by the Jesuits, as well as in the old chronicles. New plants, new fruits, new animals compelled new words. Native terms enriched the vocabulary. Of course, as has happened with us, often a word for which the new nation is reproached turns out to be an original importation from the motherland. One of the oldest documents in the history of Brazilianisms appeared in Paris during the first quarter of the XIXth century and is reprinted by João Ribeiro as a rarity little known to his countrymen; it formed part of the Introduction à l’Atlas ethnographique du globe, prepared by Adrien Balbi and covering the races and languages of the world. The Portuguese section was entrusted to Domingos Borges de Barros, baron and later viscount de Pedra Branca, a warm advocate of Brazilian independence, then recently achieved. This, according to Ribeiro, is supposed to constitute the “first theoretical contribution” to the study of Brazilianisms. It is written in French, and because of its documentary importance I translate it in good measure:
“Languages reveal the manners and the character of peoples. That of the Portuguese has the savor of their religious, martial traits; thus the words honnête, galant, éate, bizarre, etc., possess a meaning quite different from that they have in French. The Portuguese tongue abounds in terms and phrases for the expression of impulsive movements and strong actions. In Portuguese one strikes with everything; and when the Frenchman, for example, feels the need of adding the word coup to the thing with which he does the striking, the Portuguese expresses it with the word of the instrument alone. One says, in French, un coup de pierre; in Portuguese, pedrada (a blow with a stone); un coup de couteau is expressed in Portuguese by facada (a knife thrust) and so on.…
“Without becoming unidiomatic, one may boldly form superlatives and diminutives of every adjective; this is done sometimes even with nouns. Harshness of the pronunciation has accompanied the arrogance of expression.… But this tongue, transported to Brazil, breathes the gentleness of the climate and of the character of its inhabitants; it has gained in usage and in the expression of tender sentiments, and while it has preserved all its energy it possesses more amenity.…
“To this first difference, which embraces the generality of the Brazilian idiom, one must add that of words which have altogether changed in accepted meaning, as well as several other expressions which do not exist in the Portuguese language and which have been either borrowed from the natives or imported into Brazil by the inhabitants of the various oversea colonies of Portugal.”
There follow some eight words that have changed meaning, such, for example, as faceira, signifying lower jaw in Portugal, but coquette in Brazil; as a matter of fact, Ribeiro shows that the Portuguese critics who censured this “Brazilianism” did not know the history of their own tongue. In the XVIIth century faceira was synonymous with pelintra, petimêtre, elegante (respectively, poor fellow, dandy, fashionable youth); it became obsolete in Portugal, but in Brazil was preserved with exclusive application to the feminine. The Brazilian words unknown in Portugal are some fifty in number upon the Baron’s list.