James S. Holton

Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

Not having behind it the force of tradition which supports the study of French, Spanish, and German, the study of Portuguese attracts only students vitally interested in Brazil or Portugal. In most, if not all American universities, a candidate for the doctorate in Romance languages need not learn a word of Portuguese, even though the greatest, really the only great, epic poet of the Iberian peninsula wrote in Portuguese; even though Brazilian literature is the equal of any in Latin America and surpasses most; and despite the fact that our most important trade partner in Latin America, the only country of the region possessing the combination of area, resources and people necessary to develop into a first-class industrial power, does not speak Spanish but Portuguese. Now, if Portuguese were a strange and difficult tongue, all this neglect would be much more understandable, but anyone with a good command of Spanish can acquire a reading facility in Portuguese in a very short time and with a minimum of effort. The other skills will, of course, take somewhat longer, but even there, the Spanish speaker has half the distance run before he starts. The following outline is offered in the hope that some of those Hispanists who have remained in lamentable ignorance of the language of Gil Vicente, Cam6es, Ega de Queiroz, Machado de Assis, Erico Verissimo, and Graciliano Ramos, will feel encouraged to repair this lack. The material is presented from the point of view of one who already knows Spanish, and who therefore needs only to be informed of the points where Portuguese is different. What I have set forth here has no pretensions of being an exhaustive study. This is an outline of the main points of grammar, orthography, and word-formation. The statements on