The Portuguese language in the Colloquia, et Dictionariolum Octo Linguarum by Noël de Berlaimont (1598 version): aspects of contact with Spanish

Abstract

The two Iberian languages are introduced in the Colloquia, et dictionariolum (1530, Antwerp) at very different times and sociolinguistic contexts. Spanish is the first modern language after the bilingual original, which was introduced in a quatuor linguarum version (Flemish, French, Latin and Spanish) in Louvain in 1551. This version is known that this version under the responsibility of the Castilians, who a few years later added some brief grammatical descriptions of Spanish morphology and pronunciation to the manual. For the Portuguese text, whose author is not known, there is no graphophonetic description and it is known that this translation was introduced in an octo linguarum version (Latin, French, Flemish, German, Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese) in 1598 (Delft), at a time of great Spanish linguistic and cultural fertilisation. Did the tradition of the Spanish text in Berlaimont’s manual influence the translation of the Portuguese text? Is the Spanish text a kind of linguistic hypotext (Gérard Genette) of the Portuguese text? This paper aims to provide some answers about the relationship between these two texts at the lexical and syntactic levels, also addressing elements of the external history of Berlaimont’s textbook and the nature of conversation manuals.