Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [213]
The language that his soldiers and sailors (and merchants) spoke was the distinctive Romance spoken on the western flank of Iberia, originally one with Galician, which (probably since Roman times) had developed differently from the versions of the centre (Castilian) and the east (Catalan). It was, and is, distinguished by the palatalisation of sibilants (sh [š] and zh [ž], rather than s and z), the voicing of sibilants when they occur between vowels, and by the widespread nasalisation of vowels when they are followed by n and m (the latter two features also characteristic of French). It also reduces vowels when they are unstressed, and even deletes whole syllables.
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),