Ajuntamento de fontes para a história do português popular brasileiro: amores, desamores e outras espécies de dores

Abstract

Although Popular and Standard Brazilian Portuguese share the same norm continuum, the linguistic reality in Brazil is polarized and plural and the boundaries between them has not been well clarified yet. Thus the work of reconstruction of their history cannot follow the same directions. The history of literacy is a history of few, a history of white men, a history of the flower of society. In this particular case, the archives are usually sufficiently generous. Differently, investigating the Popular Brazilian Portuguese is dealing with record dispersion and, above all, with problems that involve questions related to collecting and editing the poverty of material to be of some usefulness. The present work aims at examining these source problems, starting from the observation of documents written in the scope of a black brotherhood during the nineteenth century in Salvador, painted boards from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, that constitute a sort of votive practical and, finally, letters of “cangaceiros”, from the beginning of the twentieth century.