O processo de escolarização e normatização do português em Sergipe del Rey, século XIX: a obra de José Ortiz (1862)

Abstract

Following Rosa Virgínia Mattos e Silva’s reflections on the paths the Portuguese language has taken in Brazil until its current form, our work has come to add up to the work of other scholars who aim at unveiling not only the linguistic phenomena that happen inside the language, that is, the understanding of its internal history, but also the socio-historical facts that prompted (phonetic, morphologic, syntactic) changes, that is, the understanding of its external history. As Mattos e Silva sates it, “the time has come to gather together historical linguistics scholars who are interested in rebuilding the still complex and superficially unveiled path that led to the constitution of the Brazilian Portuguese in the multifaceted context of the Brazilian socio-history” (MATTOS e SILVA, 2004, p. 29). For such, the author envisages four research fields which interconnect and complete one another. Our research fits in field a), the field which will move towards the reconstruction of a social-linguistic history, by having as its empirical field 18th century Province of Sergipe del Rey in the 1834-1870 time span. Our study object is the process of standardization of the Portuguese language in Sergipe del Rey by means of the schooling process in the above-mentioned time span. Therefore, our work is backed by one of the strands of field a proposed by Mattos e Silva (p.59), which is the one “that will be the reconstruction of the history of schooling in Brazil, which is formulated by Houaiss as the penetration of the written language, a key factor in understanding the polarization between standard and colloquial Brazilian Portuguese”. As we know, Brazil was mainly a rural country in the 19th century whose literacy process, in Mattos e Silva’s words, was “ slow and of low quality” (p.59). Neither was the schooling process in the Province of Sergipe del Rey worth of praise due to the harsh economic situation the Province had been going through. The study of the history of Sergipe, covering the period in which it was still part of the Province of Bahia until its emancipation allowed us to gather data on its demography and its ethnic and social distribution, which were very important for us to understand its social picture in the 19th century. As for the schooling process, we were able to attest that most of the poor population did not have access to the written cultures due to the bad distribution os schools. There were few school materials available for the teaching of Portuguese, according to the many reports released by the public instruction directors and supervisors. Besides, the poorly qualified teachers as well as the lack of appropriate places for teaching the young seriously compounded the situation. Not only the poorly qualified teachers left too much to be desired, the few grammar books available did too, which is the case with the Novo Systema de Estudar a Grammatica Portugueza (1862), by Jose Ortiz, a medical doctor and bachelor in arts from Rio Grande do Sul. Jose Ortiz’s work is one of the many philosophical, standard-oriented grammar books, whose language standard is that of Portugal. The analytical procedure was the historical-comparative one by which we adopted three other grammar books, very well-known in the 19th century: Grammatica Philosophica da Lingua Portugueza, by Jeronimo Soares Barbosa (1822); Epitome da Grammatica Portugueza, by Antonio de Moraes e Silva (1806; 1824) and Grammatica da Lingua Portugueza, by Francisco Sotero dos Reis (1871). By doing so it was able to identify the similarities and differences among these authors and their works. As with the work of Jose Ortiz , it was possible to notice his attempt to impose the Portuguese standard in certain moments, in a totally artificial way, far from reality, even to those who were accomplished speakers of the language.