Phonological and lexical reconstruction of the Proto-Creole of Gulf of Guinea

• Grant number: 13/08100-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2013
• End date: December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature
• Principal Investigator: Gabriel Antunes de Araujo
• Grantee: Manuele Bandeira de Andrade Lima
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

There are four Portuguese Creole languages in the Gulf of Guinea: Santome, Angolar, Principense and Fa d'ambô. Günther (1973), Ferraz (1979) and Hagemeijer (2009), among others, claim that in the late fifteenth century contact and multilinguism promoted the emergence of a protocreole that latter branched into four languages. Thus, these languages, though now distinct from each other, had a common origin (Hagemeijer, 2009). The aim of this research is rebuild the phonology and the lexical component of this protocreole of Gulf of Guinea, based on the Comparative Method of Historical Linguistics (Kaufman, 1990; HOCK, 1991; CROWLEY, 1992; RANKIN, 2003; HARRISON, 2003; CAMPBELL, 1998). In this project, I propose a reconstruction based on the analysis of the daughter languages that make up the branch: Santome (spoken on the island of São Tomé), Principense (spoken on the island of Príncipe), Angolar (spoken by the angolar community in São Tomé) and Fa d'ambô (spoken on the island of Annobón, Equatorial Guinea). My corpus has about 2,500 words (of each language) that belong to the common lexicon of the four languages. Here, cognates will be used to discriminate phonological and lexical-semantic similarities between these languages, in order to identify their irregular and regular changes.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

DE ARAUJO, GABRIEL ANTUNES; BANDEIRA, MANUELE; AGOSTINHO, ANA LIVIA. Vowel Harmony in the Proto-Creole of the Gulf of Guinea. ENTREPALAVRAS, v. 10, n. 1, p. 36-58, JAN-APR 2020. (13/08100-4)

MANUELE BANDEIRA; GABRIEL ANTUNES DE ARAUJO. A estratégia reflexiva no protocrioulo do Golfo da Guiné. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, v. 38, n. 2, 2022-08-01. (13/08100-4)

MANUELE BANDEIRA; ANA LÍVIA AGOSTINHO; SHIRLEY FREITAS. ASPECTOS FONÉTICO-FONOLÓGICOS DO ANGOLAR MODERNO. Alfa, rev. linguíst. (São José Rio Preto), v. 65, 2021-11-01. (13/08100-4)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

LIMA, Manuele Bandeira de Andrade. Phonological and lexical reconstruction of Proto-Creole from the Gulf of Guinea. 2016. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.