Abbreviations in eighteenth-century letters: Graphic clues and literacy degrees

Abstract

This research object was the use of abbreviations in 18th century private letters written in Portuguese. In this context, the main hypothesis was that such resources may highlight the social aspects of the scribe of past periods, thus allowing their sociolinguistic characterization. To test it, we adopted the Language Variation and Change Theory (Labov, 1972) regarding the data selection, collection, and analysis. The corpus is composed of 24 private letters from the 18th century written in Portuguese Language of Brazil and European Portuguese by men and women of higher and lower social classes and are from two sources: (i) Fundo Barao de Camargos Collection, of the Historical Archive of the Museu of the Inconfidencia, and (ii) Post Scriptum Project: A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writing (Early Modern Portugal and Spain), of the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon. The results showed that (i) the external variables education level, socioeconomic status and gender and the internal variables typology and rule complexity interfered with the use of abbreviations; thus, (ii) the abbreviations translate linguistic and extralinguistic information about the one behind the quill and are a methodological tool for the characterization of the literacy degree of the scribe.