Talk:Pequeno Português

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I never heard about this "Simple portuguese" et I am sure that there is no pidgin of portuguese in Angola. Can you tell more about this ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chavagne (talk • contribs) 08:15, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Evidence?

There are plenty of references to pequeno português on the internet, the overwhelming majority (and clearly citing an earlier work verbatim) as en passant mentions of Alfred Valdman's equality en passant reference to it. Nowhere though, does anyone call it a variant; it is variously described as restructured, creolised and even as pretoguês, an extremely derogatory racist term, used to refer to black people (preto — hence pretoguês) with poor command of the language. Normally with any pidgin, creole, lingua franca, contact language, etc, invariably the researchers who have studied it have comipled a sample vocabulary to exemplify differences between the it and the standard. Has anyone ever seen such a vocabulary? If anyone has and can present it here that would be wonderful. Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 13:14, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Kwami, could I interest you in taking a look? Thanks, regards, Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 13:19, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi Rui. This is what I found, by Liliana Inverno, "A transição de Angola para o português vernáculo", in Ana Maria Carvalho, ed. (2009) Português em contato, p 90–91. It seems to be a RS, and I would follow it (and whatever else you've found) for anything in the article that is not adequately sourced.

Entre 1750 e 1822 os portugueses procuraram impedir a crescente africanização, cultural e linguística, da elite afro-portuguesa em Angola, nomeadamente através do decreto de 1765 do governador Francisco Innocencio da Sousa Coutinho, que desencorajava o uso de línguas africanas no ensino dos filhos dessa elite (Vansina 2001: 274–275). Condudo, a situação manteve-se praticamente inalterada até meados do século XIX. Os testemunhos existentes na literatura relativamente ao português falado em Angola nesta época apontam para a utilização de variedades reestruturadas do mesmo entre as camadas mais pobres da cidades costeiras e arredores. Estas corresponderão às variedades referidas por Schuchardt (1888: 230) como mestiço e por Valdman (1978: 22) como pequeno português. Ambas as descrições apresentadas nos levam a supor que estas eram variedades mistas, mas não é claro se são variedades mistas do português ou do kimbundu. Por exemplo, Schuchardt (1888: 67), citando Soares (1886: 14), define o mestiço como sendo composto "de palavras portuguezas accomodadas au génio do bundo" [i.e. morfologia do kimbundu]. Este fenómeno é igualmente referido por Vasconcellos (1901: 159):

Comme dans les idiomes bantous, le singulier se distingue du pluriel au moyen de préfixes, et en quimbundo au préfixe ri- au singulier correspond ma- au pluriel: il arrive dans le mot machado «hace», qui, selon les lois phonétiques, est devenu maxâlu, le Nègres voient un pluriel formé à l'aide du préfixe ma-, et ils lui donnent un singulier ri-xâlu.

Condudo, Chatelain (1984: v), ao referir-se ao kimbundu falado em Luanda, por oposição ao kimbundu falado no interior da colónia, define-o como sendo "needlessly mixed with Portuguese elements" e oferecendo, por isso, "poor material for the study of genuine Ki-mbundu". Chatelain (1984) enumera ainda 90 empréstimos do português ao kimbundu, que incluem não só empréstimos lexicais (ex. palaia < PE: praia), mas também gramaticais (ex. poji < PE: pois), bem como vários exemplos de palavras portuguesas "acomodadas" à morfologia do kimbundu (ex. njanena [<] PE: janela vs. jinjanena < PE: janelas). À luz destes dados, embora limitados, os traços linguísticos que segundo Chatelain (1984) distinguiam o kimbundu de Luanda do kimbundu falado no interior parecem resultar de um empréstimo estrutural moderado (Thomasos/Kaufman 1988) do português ao kimbundu.[fn] Se confrontarmos estes dados com o mestiço referido por Schuchardt (1888), surge a dúvida sobre se essa variedade seria uma mistura do português com o kimbundu ou vice-versa.

fn: Thomason/Kaufman (1988: 37) definem empréstimo nos termos seguintes: "the incorporation of foreign features into a group's native language by speakers of that language: the native language is retained but is changed by the addition of the incorporated features". Numa situação de empréstimo estructural moderado, Thomason/Kaufman (1988: 75) identificam, entre outras, as seguintes características principais: alteração da ordem das palavras na frase, empréstimo de morfemas e categorias flexionais e alterações ao nível da estrutura silábica.

— kwami (talk) 21:10, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Kwami. Thanks for the input and effort. I have looked at all these sources before and I believe they strengthen my point that there never was such a variant.

• Liliana Inverno has no new evidence and makes this clear when she says that "Os testemunhos existentes na literatura relativamente ao português falado em Angola nesta época ("meados do século XIX" [mid-19th century]) apontam para a utilização de variedades reestruturadas do mesmo entre as camadas mais pobres da cidades costeiras e arredores".
• In an attempt at providing an origin for the term pidgin, Valdman describes language use tipified as "petit", including pequeno portugues as a "forme réduite et abâtardie de cette langue" (reduced and bastardised form of the langauge [in question].
• Further into the book, in a paragraph on Portuguese creoles in Africa, Valdman refers to the "pequeno portugês parlé dans les grandes villes de l'Angola".
• It would be highly improbable that people "dans les grandes villes de l'Angola""/ "cidades costeiras e arredores" would be speaking one common form of Portuguese. The cities in question are Luanda and Benguela and to a smaller degree Lobito. The distance from Luanda to Benguela is around 500 km and there were no roads connecting the two to enable a common form of the supposed pequeno portugês to evolve.
• This ""forme réduite et abâtardie" happens 'spontaneously', with known and predictable elemenst such as absence of the plural form of nouns and adjectives but observed in pronouns, reduction of verbal forms to present tense third person, gender reduced to masculine. This would result in a sentence such as "os cabra come os folha" [the (masc plural) goat (femn singular) eat (singular) the (masc plural{ leaf (femn singular); present tense third person would result in "eu come, tu come, nós come, ele come". This is not a variant form of the language, it is an initial stage of mastery subject to improvement directly proportion to amount of exposure to the language.
• In the case of a true variant, it is possible for an individual to master more than one variant. Many Brazilians and Portuguese who have had sufficient exposure to both do this routiunely; most educated Brazilians do it all the time, swithing between what they refer to as norma culta (the educated form) and the colloquial form. It is not uncommon to see a professional language practitioner ask a colleague "tu vai no concerto (three errors, according to norma culta.
• Similarly, Creole speakers in Cape Verde, Sao Tomé etc speak both creole and Portuguese (and African languages in S.Tomé, Guinea, etc). This is not the case with the so-called pequeno português, where all evidence points to a very low level of prioficiency because of insuffient contact with speakers with a higher level of command. This is the case even today, which contradicts and brings into question the statement "variant of Portuguese spoken in the 18th and 19th by people on the periphery of the major urban settlements along the coast of Angola. What happened after the 19th century? Did people all become highly proficient in Portuguese? Then, after an hiatus of a century they went back to it? That was not the case, hence the widespread use of pretoguês, the derogatory term used to describe the Portuguese spoken in the musseques (informal settlements on the periphery of Luanda).

Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 17:10, 30 August 2018 (UTC)