An evolving language: an epistolary collection of morphological and orthographic peculiarities

Abstract

A specific and selected epistolary corpus—the correspondence between members of Fernando Pessoa’s family—is an interesting sample of the flexibility of the spelling of the Portuguese language in the last twenty years of the 19th century. Exponents of a moderately wealthy and cultured bourgeois family, the authors of these letters show a whole series of uncertainties and alternations in the graphic realisation of their thoughts, undoubtedly due to the fluidity of the Portuguese language at the time, as well as idiosyncratic uses and the possible influence of their region of origin, the Azores. These phenomena, not only orthographic but also affecting morphology, are presented here, divided into categories, and commented on, representing a portrait of the familiar use of Portuguese
at the turn of the century.