Discoveries, missions and interlinguistic meetings of the Portuguese language in the East

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to highlight the relevance of the Portuguese language as a lingua franca and a metalanguage for the description of non-European languages, namely Japanese, in the Portuguese colonization context and missionary activities in the East. In order to achieve this purpose, we present three topics: the first is related to the moment when Portuguese became the vehicular language for the first translations of several Amerindian, African, and Asian languages, unknown by Europeans, until the age of expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; in a second topic, we approach the Jesuit epistolography concerning Japan in order to understand the process of acquiring and describing this language; the third is a brief analysis of the Art of the Japanese Language by João Rodrigues, evidencing some innovative aspects.