Early Portuguese lexicographic tradition: equivalents and loans in Caetano de Lima’s dictionary manuscripts

Abstract

The exhaustive comparison between Portuguese and the main modern languages is a late phenomenon. Only at the end of seventeenth century, did Portugal feel the need for a methodical learning of foreign languages and for didactic tools with a marked lexical component, in which we include the essential bilingual dictionaries. Nevertheless, it is in the first half of the eighteenth century that the first glossaries are published, while the first bilingual dictionaries with alphabetical order and an extensive nomenclature will appear only in the second half of the century. In order to overcome this lag, Vernacular-Latin dictionaries were imported and handwritten dictionaries were compiled and adapted according to the needs of each user. Research on the origins of Portuguese-Italian lexicography has provided important information on the development of the techniques used to compile dictionaries and the contrastive analysis of languages. The first printed dictionary is an addition to Caetano de Lima’s Grammatica Italiana (1734) and it contains an appendix of hard words (where semantic peculiarities and idiomatic expressions are explained) and an onomasiologic dictionary of common words. It has been described as a basic albeit functional lexicographic tool, suitable for beginners’ needs. Recently, a manuscript version of this dictionary has been identified (Diccionario de Nomes Portuguezes e Italianos Dispostos por Materias, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, CXIII-1-33), as well as the manuscript of a larger general dictionary (Diccionario Italiano-Portuguez, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, cod. 3342). This impressive lexicographic corpus is compiled about fifty years before the first printed Italian-Portuguese dictionary. The analysis demonstrates that the author tried to compile a much wider dictionary than the version that was actually published. In the manuscript, we can identify problems in some areas, such as the definition of lexical domains (due to linguistic and cultural factors), the selection of nomenclature and the possibility of translation.