Paper short abstract:

Peixoto’s 1741 "Obra nova da língua geral de mina" is a rare document about Ewe-Fon in 18th century Brazil. Our analysis of semantic aspects in word formation and metaphorical expressions can serve both creolistics, research on substrate influence in BP and contact studies on Portuguese and Ewe-Fon.

Paper long abstract:

Antônio da Costa Peixoto's "Obra nova da língua geral de Mina" (1741) documents the presence of Ewe-Fon in 18th century Brazil. It lists 899 lexical items and expressions and their equivalents in Portuguese.

Re-edited in 1944 in Lisbon through the Agência Geral das Colônias, further research on the subject include comments by Lopes (1945), Rodrigues (2003) and more recently, by Yeda Pessoa de Castro (2002), as well as research by Margarida Petter (ongoing).

Rodrigues (2003) started to annotate "as formas correspondentens aos itens lexicais da "Obra Nova" registradas no grande dicionário de Westermann" in 1957 (Rodrigues 2003: 93), and returned to annotating corresponding Fon words in the 1980ies with the help of a native speaker from Benin, Lucien Akabassi. We recently started working on a new digitalized version of Peixoto's glossary, including multi-lingual equivalents from both European languages (to make the document more easily accessible to a non-lusophone public) and from Ewe (Togo varieties), a task possible thanks to the native speaker competence of D. Samla.

In our paper, we will analyze some semantic aspects such as new word formations and metaphorical expressions.

We think that Peixoto is an extremely valuable resource for both creolistics, research on African substrate influence in Brazilian Portuguese and diachronic studies on Ewe-Fon.