Marcas de oralidade e de escriptualidade em documentos setecentistas: uma forma de caracterização do escrevente e de reconstrução da oralidade pretérita

Abstract

One of the problems for those who wish to research in historical linguistics, especially the variationist sociolinguistics, is to have archives that can provide the verification of the various social characteristics of scribes. Furthermore, we have a difficulty to rescue the orality data, because we can only have written documents. Despite this context, the rescue of marks that can refer to orality in preterit times remains viable, in an attempt to reconstruct the spoken language of the past from these documents. In this sense, the proposed study aims to analyze orality marks in a corpus 18th century, more specifically in the Minas Gerais dialect. Furthermore, as it is based on the assumptions of sociolinguistics, our work can be configured as an additional resource for the evaluation of the writer's profile, in view of that we do not always have available information that denote what would be their level of mastery of writing skills. Our hypothesis is that the choice of certain spellings may indicate the stage of acquisition of writing, thus revealing the level of literacy of the writer. Thus, we believe that people from more popular social levels would tend to reproduce more phonetic writing, while people from more affluent social classes would adopt etymological spellings. In order to verify the feasibility of our initial hypothesis, we selected approximately two thousand and five hundred words from four documents related to the current city of Diamantina, which in our understanding represent the cultural elite of the 1700s and the less affluent social class, namely, Termos de Devassas (1750), Estatuto da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco (1778), Livro de Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Amparo (1781) e Livro de Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora das Mercês (1782). Once the spelling variables were identified, we chose five phenomena that could provide us with clues as to the profile of these writers in dealing with written language: (i) consonant twinning; (ii) the representation of nasality; (iii) voiceless vs voiced representation for /s/ and /z/; (iv) the lowering of vowels; and (v) the raising of vowels. Of the selected phenomena, the representation of the voiceless sibilant was the one that most impacted our results, followed by the representation of nasality, which showed high rates of deviations, especially among writers representing higher social classes. The twinning of consonants, the lowering and raising of vowels, despite pointing to some difficulties of the writers, were evaluated as less complex phenomena. What we observed, in the end, is that not only the quantitative analysis is enough to verify the level of literacy of these scribes, it is necessary to resort to historical, social, normative issues, in addition to contemporary studies on the acquisition of writing and on the description of phenomena related to what we chose, in order to evaluate our hypothesis. In conclusion, we verified a more archaic writing in the Livros de Compromisso, while the clerics demonstrated greater autonomy with the written technology, even if this behavior reflects in spelling deviations.