Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

An example that shows much of what makes Portuguese distinctive is the equivalent of ‘will you give me hot eggs and bread’: spelt faz favor de darme ovos quentes e páo , it is pronounced faž favor de darme, where Castilian would have me haces el favor de darme huevos calientes y pan , me aθes el faßor de darme weßos kalientes y pan.

All in all, Portuguese had come to sound very different from its neighbour Castilian, with the strange result that nowadays Portuguese and Brazilians can still by and large follow spoken Spanish, while for most Spaniards and Spanish-speaking Americans Portuguese is quite impenetrable.

Its homeland was a wide band from north to south in the peninsula, including the area now known as Galicia in modern Spain. The whole region had been taken by (Arabic- and Berber-speaking) Moors in 713, but the northern part down to the Douro was retaken by Christians when the Berbers fell out with their Arab masters in the 740s. The rest of the region yielded very gradually over the next four centuries to the military advance of what became the Christian kingdom of León; but a division made by its king in 1128, assigning the provinces around Portucale (modern Porto) to his son-in-law for purposes of defence against a trying new threat, the onslaught of Moorish Al-moravids from Africa, turned out to have very long-lasting consequences. Portugal, from the Minho to the Mondego, went on to establish its autonomy (1143), its dukes becoming kings (1179); but for the next century its expansion (at the expense of the Moors) was southward only. The Galicians and Portuguese, although still speaking essentially the same language, were sundered permanently. The capital was moved south in 1248 from Porto to Lisbon (Roman Olisippō). The Portuguese dialects may have taken some influence from the old Lusitanian language, which had been spoken south of the Douro up to Roman times, and Mozarabic, which had evolved up under five hundred years of Moorish rule; but there is little written evidence for local features of the vernacular. Emerging on to the written page in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Portuguese came to be associated particularly with lyric poetry, used for this purpose even by a king of Castile.

E assi Santa Maria Thus Saint Mary ajudou a seus amigos , helped her friends, pero que d’outra lei eran , although they were of another law, a britar seus eemigos to shatter their enemies, que, macar que eran muitos , for although they were many, nonos preçaron dous figos , they did not give two figs for them, e assi foi ssa mercee and thus was her mercy de todos mui connoçuda. made known to all.

Alfonso X of Castile (1221-84), Cantiga de Santa Maria , no. 181, last stanza

From the beginning of the sixteenth century this language began to be heard all round the coasts of Africa and southern Asia, and for the first time on the shores of Brazil.

There had been a lull in exploration after the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460. But then in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias had ended the long years of Portuguese creep down the African coast, by demonstrating that its southward extent was finite: and who knew what lay beyond that last Cabo da Boa Esperança (’Cape of Good Hope’)? There was then another short interlude, from 1488 to 1498, before the next step was taken; but exploration issues were not forgotten. In fact, it was then that Portugal attempted to challenge Castile’s right to the lands newly discovered by Columbus in his first (1492) voyage to the west. The claim was not upheld, but it was ultimately highly beneficial, since when the dispute was resolved by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (in Portuguese Tardesilhas ), Portugal was granted all lands east of a meridian line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This, ultimately, guaranteed its right to Brazil.

But this prospect was dimly appreciated, if at all, at the time. Far more striking, at first blush, was the achievement four years later of Vasco da Gama when he rounded that last cape, and sailed triumphantly, and arrogantly, into the ocean beyond: at long last, he had achieved the highest goal of a century of Portuguese navigation, and found the sea route to India. This achievement turned out to fulfil the most extravagant hopes of the previous century, for besides finding their way to India the Portuguese found that they also had enough strength to secure direct access to its fabulous merchandise, breaking the centuries-old monopoly of Muslim middlemen. And then, incredibly and immediately, another great prize fell into their laps. Acting swiftly to exploit their new Indian opportunity, they happened to take a roundabout course to the southern tip of Africa: the result was the discovery of Brazil, on 22 April 1500. Now they had the basis for an empire in the New World, as well as exclusive access to the most luxurious market of the Old. Fortune was really smiling on Portuguese enterprise.

It continued to smile for most of the rest of the new century. By the end of it, there were profitable Portuguese trading settlements, protected by fortresses and fleets, all along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and at strategic points beyond, in Malaya and the South China Seas. There were seven settlements in east Africa, six on the Gulf of Oman, fifteen on the western coast of India, four in Ceylon, and two on the eastern coast of India. Malacca, Macassar, Ternate, Tidore, Timor and Macao were all Portuguese possessions.

Although they never achieved the full trade monopoly they were seeking, the Indian Ocean for a century or two was almost a Portuguese lake. Like the Phoenicians and Greeks of the first millennium BC, they did not attempt to control the hinterlands.

But unlike those Phoenicians and Greeks, they were interested in something beyond profit and adventure: after military and commercial expansion came a drive for religious conversion, and Catholic dioceses were set up in Mozambique in 1512, Goa in 1534, Cochin in 1558, Malacca in 1558, Macao in 1575, Meliapore (in eastern India) in 1606; there was even an attempt to spread the faith beyond the shelter of secure Portuguese trading posts, in Ethiopia in 1555, in Funay (i.e. Japan) in 1588, and Tonkin (i.e. Vietnam) in 1659. Like their Spanish cousins at that time in the far more vulnerable territories of the New World, the Portuguese were determined to vindicate the Pope’s faith in them, and their own faith in the Christian God.

And besides deliberately attempting to spread the word of God, the Portuguese were inevitably also spreading their own. The linguistic effects of this commerce-led, and faith-reinforced, expansion were complex. But they give a foretaste of the kind of spread that this ship-borne imperialism would engender as different European nations followed in the Portuguese wake.

First of all, Portuguese was the language used in the fortresses and trading units that were set up as permanent agencies, small expatriate communities in port cities and their surrounds. This was not in itself very significant: inevitably, after all, emigrants go on using their own language to their own kind, and pass it on to at least some of their children and servants when they establish themselves in households in their new homes, especially if they are keeping in regular touch with their countrymen—and trade with Europe was the very raison d’ ětre for all these Portuguese settlements, actively maintained against mounting competition until the middle of the seventeenth century. (This carreira da Índia averaged five ships a year from 1550 to the 1630s. [579]) The early shock value of their arrival and the attendant prestige may even have encouraged others for a time to associate with them, and learn from them; in the same way, Christianity proved most attractive in the first couple of generations after it was first preached in Asia, but its growth fell away once it became as well known as the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim institutions it was bidding to replace.