History of Portuguese
The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC.
Although the western territories to the south of the Tagus River were conquered only after the victory of Licinius Crassus in the year 93 BC,[1] only an estimated four hundred words of the native languages[2] persist in modern Portuguese.
The Germanic languages influenced Galician-Portuguese by introducing words often linked to the military like guerra (war) or laverca (lark), placenames such as Resende, animals like ganso (goose), texugo (badger), human feelings such as orgulho (pride), verbs like brigar (to fight), suffixes like reguengo (royal domain) and everyday objects such as frasco (flask).
From 711, with the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the Umayyad conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania, Arabic was adopted as the administrative language in the conquered regions.
Today, this phase is known as "Proto-Portuguese" simply because the earliest of these documents are from the former County of Portugal, although Portuguese and Galician were still a single language.
What modern scholars call Galician-Portuguese was originally the native language of the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, which was founded in 410 and included the northern part of present-day Portugal.
These songs were traditionally attributed to Alfonso X, a Castilian king, though more recent work shows that they must have been composed in collaboration with many translators, poets and musicians.
With the political separation of the County of Portugal from Galicia, Galician-Portuguese lost its unity and slowly became two increasingly distinct languages.
This growing difference accelerated when the kingdom of León was united with Castile (13th century) and Galician was increasingly influenced by Castilian.
Portuguese has been made an official language of Mozambique, Angola, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, East Timor and Macao.
In 1540, João de Barros crown officer published his Gramática da Língua Portuguesa along with moral dialogues and basics of the Catholic Church to help teaching young aristocrats.
By the mid-16th century, Portuguese had become a lingua franca in Asia and Africa, used for not only colonial administration and trade but also communication between local officials and Europeans of all nationalities.
The spread of the language was helped by its association with the Catholic missionary efforts, which led to its being called Cristão ("Christian") in many places.
The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century, despite the severe measures taken by the Dutch to abolish it in Ceylon and Indonesia.
Some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal.
A few words remained virtually unchanged, like carro, taberna ("tavern"), or even returned to a form close to the original, such as coxa ("thigh") – in this case, however, only the spelling looks identical: Latin ⟨x⟩ and Portuguese ⟨x⟩ designate two completely different sounds, [ks] and [ʃ] respectively.
[15] Around the 16th century, according to Fernão de Oliveira's Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, in Chapter VIII, /a/ and /ɐ/ would already be considered as different phonemes.
[16] Prosodic change in the Classical to Modern pronunciations of Portuguese has been studied through a statistical analysis in evolution of written texts in the 16th and 17th centuries.
[20] This consonant was then at a later stage lost or modified in Portuguese, although it was retained in Galician in some words (e.g. modern unha (/uŋa/) identical in pronunciation to medieval hũa).
Epenthesis—the insertion of a sound to break up a sequence of vowels: Examples such as the former two have been used by some authors to argue that the digraph nh was a nasal approximant in medieval Portuguese, and thus its pronunciation [j̃] in most dialects of Brazil and São Tomé and Príncipe is the original one.
This produced a system of six fricatives and one affricate, which is still maintained in parts Minho region and northeast Portuguese province of Trás-os-Montes and in the adjacent Mirandese language; but in most places, these seven sounds have been reduced to four.
(This appears to have happened no earlier than the seventeenth century, on the evidence of the spelling system used by Alexandre de Rhodes to represent Middle Vietnamese).
In central and southern Portugal (and in Rio de Janeiro and surrounding areas, due to the relocation of the Portuguese nobility in the early 1800s), they merged as lamino-alveolars before vowels, but as palato-alveolar /ʃ ʒ/ elsewhere.
Hence in Portugal pesar "to weigh" /pɨˈzaɾ/ but pregar "to preach" /prɛˈɡaɾ/ (former preegar < praedicāre); morar "to live" /muˈɾaɾ/, but corado "blushing" /kɔˈɾadu/ (former coorado < colōrātum), roubar "to rob" /ʁoˈbaɾ/.
In the transition to modern Portuguese, these were resolved in a complex but largely regular fashion, either remaining, compressing into a single vowel, turning into a diphthong, or gaining an epenthetic consonant such as /v/ or /ɲ/; see above.
