Wilmar da Rocha D'Angelis

Sistema Fonológico do Português: Rediscutindo o Consenso

Problems identified in the study and analysis of the phonology of Brazilian Indian languages belonging to the Macro-Je branch such as Kaingang, Maxakali, and Mebengokre led the author to confirm the accuracy of some intuitions on the part of Piggott (1992) and Rice (1993) on dealing with relations between nasality and sonorancy (DAngelis 1998). The applicability of the approach to the distinct processes of nasality and nasalization in Portuguese was verified with surprising results that recover some intuitions of Trubetzkoy (1939) and contribute to reconfirm the Mattoso Câmaras (1953; 1970) considerations, but at the same time go beyond them. This article presents the result of this investigation and its conclusions that suggest the validity and the necessity of reexamining even the phonemic inventory of the Portuguese language, an issue not at all questioned in the teaching of phonology, to take into account the linguistic changes in the phonological system of that language in the last fifty years.

Contra a ditadura da escola

This text, written in 1995, tries to bring to issue certain comprehension almost naive about what is making (or turning) a school, indigenous. Thats why its still up-to-date, when the schools are discussing the curriculum. The text shows the challenge to conquest an indigenous school and suggests that indigenous school education would do much (and better) if it were able of only two things: a good Mathematics teaching and the effective formation of readers.

O alinhamento pró-Estados Unidos da Fonologia no Brasil

Phonology of the Prague Scholl - followed by Câmara Jr - did not leave followers between Brazilian linguists, since in this country we watched the hegemonic victory of the distributionalist Structuralism of North America. With its theoretical limitations and its exasperate empiricism, this perspective confined the treatment of the Brazilian Portugueses Phonology and led to the abandonment of the most interesting intuitions of Mattosos approach. It also impaired the treatment of the phonological component of great part of the native languages in Brazil, and at the same time, it was responsible for the formation of generations of linguists in our country. Its victory did not correspond only to an academic dispute, but it integrated a Latin American process of alignment with the United States, which, in Phonology, still survives.