José Leite de Vasconcelos
Encyclopedia
José Leite de Vasconcelos Cardoso Pereira de Melo (1858–1941) was a Portuguese ethnographer and prolific author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 who wrote extensively on Portuguese philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 and prehistory
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...

. He was the founder and the first director of the Portuguese National Museum of Archaeology
National Archaeology Museum (Lisbon)
The National Archaeology Museum of Lisbon is located in Lisbon, Portugal. It is one of the most important Portuguese museums dedicated to Archaeology....

.

Biography

Since childhood, Leite de Vasconcelos was attentive to his surroundings, recording in small notebooks everything that interested him. At 18 he went to Oporto, where in 1881 he completed a degree in natural sciences and, in 1886, a second degree in medicine. However, he practiced as a physician for only one year, serving as a health care administrator in Cadaval
Cadaval
Cadaval is a municipality in Portugal with a total area of 174.9 km² and a total population of 14,385 inhabitants.The municipality is composed of 10 parishes, and is located in Lisbon District....

 during 1887.

Philological research

His 1886 thesis, Evolução da linguagem (Evolution of language) demonstrated an early interest that would come to occupy all his long life. His scientific training had imparted a rigorous and exhaustive investigative discipline to his work, whether in philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

, archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 or ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

. He began the journals Revista Lusitana (1889) and Arqueólogo Português (1895), and founded the Museu Etnológico de Belém in 1893.

At the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

, he completed a doctoral thesis, Esquisse d'une dialectologie portugaise (1901), the first important compendium of Portuguese dialects
Portuguese dialects
Portuguese dialects are variants of the Portuguese language that are shared by a substantial number of speakers over several generations, but are not sufficiently distinct from the official norms to be considered separate languages...

 (work that was later continued and advanced by Manuel de Paiva Boléo
Manuel de Paiva Boléo
Manuel de Paiva Baléo was a professor of Romance philology and Portuguese linguistics.-External links:*...

 and Luís Lindley Cintra
Luís Lindley Cintra
Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra was a prominent figure in Portuguese philology and linguistics. A prolific writer with over 80 published works, he was a keen student of the historical differentiation during the 14th and 15th centuries between literary Portuguese and Castilian Spanish...

). He also pioneered the study of Portuguese names
Onomastics
Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The words are from the Greek: "ὀνομαστικός" , "of or belonging to naming" and "ὀνοματολογία" , from "ὄνομα" "name". Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of...

 with the work Antroponímia Portuguesa and studied numismatics
Numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, and related objects. While numismatists are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, the discipline also includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the...

 and Portuguese philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 after his 1887 appointment as curator of the National Library in Lisbon
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal
The ' is the Portuguese national library, fulfilling the function of legal deposit and copyright.-External links:*...

. On the founding of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon in 1911, he was appointed professor of Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 and Medieval French
Medieval French literature
Medieval French literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in Oïl languages during the period from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth century....

.

The problem of Galician

Early in his career, Leite de Vasconcelos turned his attention to the Galician language
Galician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...

. In 1902 he published an article ("Vozes galhegas") in the journal Revista Lusitana, based on a manuscript entered into the National Library of Madrid
Biblioteca Nacional de España
The Biblioteca Nacional de España is a major public library, the largest in Spain.It is located in Madrid, on the Paseo de Recoletos.-History:...

 sometime after 1843. In his Esquisse d’une Dialectologie Portugaise he characterized Galician
Galician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...

 as a co-dialect
Pluricentric language
A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions, both in spoken and in written forms. This situation usually arises when language and the national identity of its native speakers do not, or did not, coincide.-English:...

 of Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

: rather than having arisen from Portuguese, Galician had developed as a related but distinct branch of the same Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese was a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages, in the northwest area of the Iberian Peninsula. It was first spoken in the area bounded in the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and the Douro River in the south but it was later extended south...

 trunk.

In 1910 Miuçalhas gallegas was published; drawing attention to various aspects of Galician studies, it contained a brief discourse on the linguistic boundary between Fala
Fala language
Fala is a Romance linguistic variety commonly classified in the Portuguese-Galician subgroup, with some traits from Leonese, spoken in Spain by about 10,500 people, of whom 5,500 live in a valley of the northwestern part of Extremadura near the border with Portugal...

 and Galician, corresponding to Ribadavia
Ribadavia
The town of Ribadavia is located in the southwest of the province of Ourense, Autonomous Community of Galicia, Spain. The urban area lies on the right bank of the Miño and the last course of the Avia. It is considered to be the capital of the comarca of the Ribeiro...

, Ferreiros
Ferreiros
Ferreiros may refer to:* Ferreiros, Pernambuco, a city in Pernambuco, Brazil* Ferreiros , a parish located in Amares, Portugal* Ferreiros , a parish located in Braga, Portugal...

 and San Miguel de Lobios
Lobios
Lobios is a municipality in Ourense in the Galicia region of north-west Spain.It has a population of 2,000....

 in Ourense
Ourense (province)
Ourense is a province of northwestern Spain, in the southeastern part of the Autonomous Community of Galicia. It is bordered by the provinces of Pontevedra in the west, Lugo in the north, León and Zamora in the east, and by Portugal in the south. With an area of 7,278 square km it is the only...

, much of Hermisende
Hermisende
Hermisende is a municipality located in the province of Zamora, Castile and León, Spain. According to the 2004 census , the municipality has a population of 383 inhabitants....

 and Zamora
Zamora, Spain
Zamora is a city in Castile and León, Spain, the capital of the province of Zamora. It lies on a rocky hill in the northwest, near the frontier with Portugal and crossed by the Duero river, which is some 50 km downstream as it reaches the Portuguese frontier...

 — although the last of these is, strictly speaking, a separated or transmontane Fala.

Leite was somewhat hasty in collecting his Galician data; in most cases he spent only one day on his visits to Galicia (Spain), a marked contrast to the diverse data he had amassed on other Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese
Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese was a West Iberian Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages, in the northwest area of the Iberian Peninsula. It was first spoken in the area bounded in the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and the Douro River in the south but it was later extended south...

 dialects. Despite his enormous talent and immense capacity for scholarship, perhaps he spent too much time on his other research and writing to avoid pitfalls on his Galician work. At the dawn of the 20th century a golden opportunity was lost, therefore, of applying the scientific precision of historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

, in the hands of an authentic philologist, to the analysis of the Galician language
Galician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...

.

Leite's legacy

On his death at 82 he bequeathed to the Museu Nacional de Arquelogia
National Archaeology Museum (Lisbon)
The National Archaeology Museum of Lisbon is located in Lisbon, Portugal. It is one of the most important Portuguese museums dedicated to Archaeology....

 his library of about 8,000 titles, as well as manuscripts, correspondence, engravings and photographs.

Works

  • O Dialecto Mirandez (1882)
  • Portugal Pré-histórico (Prehistoric Portugal, 1885)
  • A Evolução da Linguagem (The Evolution of Language, dissertation, Oporto, 1886)
  • Revista Lusitana (first series: 1887-1943; 39 volumes)
  • Religiões da Lusitânia (Religions of Lusitania, 1897, 1905, 1913; three volumes)
  • Estudos de Filologia Mirandesa (Philology of Miranda do Douro, 1900 and 1901; two volumes)
  • Esquisse d’une Dialectologie Portugaise (Sketch of Portuguese Dialectology, PhD dissertation, Paris, 1901)
  • Textos Archaicos (anthology, 1903)
  • Livro de Esopo (1906)
  • O Doutor Storck and A Litteratura Portuguesa (1910)
  • Lições de Philologia Portuguesa (1911)
  • História do Museu Etnológico Português (History of Portuguese Ethnological Museum, 1915)
  • Signum Salomonis (Solomon's Seal, 1918)
  • De Terra em Terra (From Land to Land, anthology)
  • De Campolide a Melrose (From Campolide to Melrose)
  • Mês de Sonho (Dream Month, a visit to the Azores, 1924)
  • A barba em Portugal (The Beard in Portugal, 1925)
  • A figa (The Gesture of Contempt, 1926)
  • Antroponímia Portuguesa (Portuguese Names, 1928)
  • Opúsculos (1928, 1928, 1929, 1931 and 1988; five volumes)
  • Etnografia Portuguesa (Portuguese Ethnography, 1933–1988, ten volumes)
  • Filologia Barranquenha - apontamentos para o seu estudo (Philology of Barrancos, 1940, ed. 1955)
  • Romanceiro Português (Portuguese Poems and Songs, ed. 1958-1960, two volumes)
  • Contos Populares e Lendas (ed. 1964, two volumes)
  • Teatro Popular Português (Portuguese Popular Theatre, ed. 1974-1979)

External links

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