História de Portugal de Fernão de Oliveira: edição semidiplomática e análise da retórica nos topônimos de Portugal

Abstract

Studies related to the history of language, with regard to the processes of linguistic change, are evidently based on records of texts produced in the past by a specific ideologically constituted subject in a community. Thus, history, in addition to showing the evolution of human beings and their adaptations to technologies, also shows the changes imposed on the conceptions about the world in which the human lives and the changes that their language undergoes over time. Therefore, many texts written in the past are recovered by philology, through textual criticism and historical linguistics, in order to preserve a material that will serve as documentary and literary testimony, in addition to enabling the observation of the states of certain languages in different past times (or different synchronies) and the evolution of certain linguistic phenomena, associated with historical and sociocultural factors, in an attempt to interpret the changes that have occurred in the past and the variations existing in a contemporary moment. It is in search of this history that we propose here to analyze the Portuguese toponyms found in the text História de Portugal, written by the humanist Fernão de Oliveira, probably around 1581, and how this author uses the rhetorical discourse from the onomastic lexicon. To do so, we seek support in specific theoretical guidelines: theory of enunciation, under the approach of Benveniste (2005; 2006), Bakhtin (2003) and Bakhtin [Voloshinov] (2004 [1929]), which place the subject at the center of linguistics reflections; to understand the process of historiographical writing, having as a parameter the rules of classical rhetoric, along the lines of the methodology of Aristotle (2005 [IV century BC]), passing through the rhetoric used in the Middle Ages to the new rhetoric or the treatise on argumentation, by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2005) and Perelman (2004); for the toponymic analysis method, the research is based on Dick's taxonomic model (1990; 1992; 1998; 2007). The data collection and analysis seek to confirm or refute the following hypotheses: i. The interpretation of toponyms would be the author's intention to mark Portugal in the field of immunity and primacy over other nations, in order to convince the people, his main interlocutor, to fight for a kingdom superior to other nations; ii. The characteristics of the historiographical discourse genre influenced Fernão de Oliveira in the construction of his narrative, based on his commitment to the “truth”, always in discussion since Greek Antiquity, specifically with Herodotus and Thucydides; iii. The incorporation of the biblical world in his text, with the author being a humanist subject, more focused on human’s issues, would be an influence of his ecclesiastical background or would it be the dualistic mentality of man in that transition period, imagined by humanism, whose behavior brought the ambivalence of the theocentric view of the Middle Ages and the anthropocentrism characteristic of the Renaissance. The result shows that Fernão de Oliveira sought to organize his ideas in order to prove Portugal’s superiority over Spain. To do so, the dominican built his discursive ethos related to the moment of enunciation in order to lead the interlocutor through a narrative that is not necessarily real, but credible.