The History of e and o in Portuguese

A Study in Linguistic Drift

Bibliographic Data

ID2870949
AuthorsAnthony J Naro (corresponding author)
Year1971
Volume47
Issue3
Pages615
Publication date1971-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/412380
OpenAlexW2317103880
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited6

Pre-16th century Portuguese had a slight raising of post-stress /e o/ to [ẹ ọ] (but not to [i u]) in pre-pause position, and a full raising of /e/ to [i] under nasalization in initial position. The first of these developments is based on a decrease in average energy of articulation after the final stress of a breath group, while the second depends on several layers of confusion of prefixes. Later changes found in several geographically separate dialects are explicated in terms of the pre-16th century situation and various aspects of the process of grammar construction, including several formal mechanisms of generalization. For the back vowels, Continental Portuguese and Brazilian share one innovation, but differ in that the former shows a generalization to mirror-image form. Ceylon Portuguese goes one step further by generalizing this raising to front vowels as well; but in the first two dialects, raising of the front series is a result of the pre-16th century confusion of prefixes, generalized in an interesting way

Articulation (sociology) · Ceylon · Confusion · Front (military) · Generalization · Geography · Geometry · Linguistics · Nasalization · Political science · Politics · Portuguese · Prefix · Raising (metalworking) · Stress (linguistics) · Vowel · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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