Inventários e Testamentos como documentos linguísticos

Abstract

The aim of this text is to offer a socio-historical categorization of the authors of the text of the Inventarios e Testamentos (I&Ts), written in São Paulo in the 16th and 17th centuries. Together with the Atas da Camara da Vila de São Paulo, the I&Ts are the oldest public written documents of the city of São Paulo. To achieve this aim, the text has been divided into three sections: (i) notes on the social history of the first centuries of Sao Paulo, (ii) Middle European Portuguese and the grammar of Protocaipira, (iii) the I&Ts as linguistic documents. The appendix lists the Portuguese, São Paulo native and foreign authors of the I&Ts provided to ease the use of these documents for research. In the conclusion I study the distribution of the authors of the I&Ts according to their origin, with a proposal about linguistic change in the Portuguese language used in São Paulo, based on this data.