Livro das Aves: edição semidiplomática e estudo lexicológico-lexicográfico do documento português do século XIV

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-diplomatic edition of the 14th-century Portuguese manuscript known today as Livro das Aves, a document that is part of the Serafim da Silva Neto Manuscript Collection, held in the custody of UnB. This edition will serve as the basis for a lexicological and lexicographical study of the language of the document. The work in question belongs to the bestiary genre, which was very popular in the Middle Ages, and presents the characteristics of birds, relating them to the moral habits of Portuguese medieval Christian society. This research investigates the Portuguese language from a historical and variational perspective, given that the language of the period in which this document was written, dating back to 1385, lacked orthographic standardization, especially in the variation of the spelling of lexical items. The necessary articulation between Philology and Historical Linguistics is also present, as well as the perspective of lexical-semantic research, especially in relation to names of birds, whose semantic or symbolic values are evident. Although there are two complete editions and one partial edition of the text that makes up the corpus of this research, a new edition is justified because the previous ones either do not explain the criteria adopted, as in the case of Pedro de Azevedo's edition, or partially standardize the language of the text, which compromises the variational study, as can be seen in Serafim da Silva Neto’s and the Nelson Rossi’s edition. we therefore decided to produce a semi-diplomatic edition, with the aim of preserving the variations in the language of the document. This edition is theoretically based on textual Philology, adopting a conservative editorial model in which only abbreviations were developed. From there, in the next stage of this research, a glossary was developed based on historical-variational lexicography, whose lexical forms are those that no longer exist in today’s language or those whose modern meaning differs from medieval usage. In this work, editing and lexicographic study are at the service of recovering the text as a linguistic and cultural monument.