Stephen Parkinson

Portuguese nasal vowels as phonological diphthongs

Abstract Portuguese nasal vowels have been analysed as phonological vowel + nasal consonant sequences, on the grounds that they function as closed syllables. At the same time, oral diphthongs have been analysed as vowel + semivowel sequences, with little consideration of the question of syllable-structure. It is argued that Portuguese oral diphthongs should be analysed phonologically as true diphthongs (complex syllablenuclei), and that this analysis is also appropriate for nasal vowels (monophthongs and diphthongs), which have a number of phonological properties in common with the oral diphthongs. The evidence for analysing nasal vowels as closed syllables is reconsidered, and is found to be valid in only one of three cases, the remaining two cases supporting the present analysis. The two analyses are reconcilable, in that nasal vowels can be vowel + consonant sequences in ‘deep’ phonology and in diphthongs in surface phonology.

Encoding Medieval Abbreviations for Computer Analysis (from Latin–Portuguese and Portuguese Non‐literary Sources)

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of handling scribal abbreviations in TEI-conformant transcriptions of medieval texts, following a conservative editorial strategy. A key distinction is drawn between alphabetic abbreviations, which represent sequences of letters, and logographic abbreviations which represent whole words. The TEI elements and can be used systematically to separate these two types: alphabetic abbreviations will be expanded in the main text, recording the abbreviated form (including TEI entities representing the main abbreviation marks) as an attribute of , while logographic abbreviations will be represented in their abbreviated form, with the expanded form recorded as an attribute of . The proposals are illustrated from common abbreviations and short text samples from tenth-century Latin-Portuguese and thirteenth-century Old Portuguese.