Chapter 7 Prosodia da Língua, an Unpublished Anonymous Eighteenth-Century Dictionary of Língua Geral Amazônica
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Abstract
German Jesuit missionaries were sent to missions in Amazonia in the 1740s and 1750s. These missions, one on the lower Madeira river, the other one on the lower Xingu, were situated in a region where Língua Geral Amazônica, derived from the indigenous Tupinambá language, was the lingua franca between surrounding Indians, settlers and missionaries. The German missionaries began to compile Portuguese-Língua Geral dictionaries using as a pattern the well-known Vocabulário na Lingua Brazílica (1622). In the center of this contribution is Father Rochus Hunderpfundt, presumably the author of his anonymous dictionary, called Prosodia da Lingoa. The comparison of this dictionary with two other existing dictionaries shows that those probably were written, a bit later, by German Jesuit missionaries, too, using the Prosodia as a model. All three dictionaries show the linguistic evolution from the first Lingua Geral dictionary (1622) through the middle of the 18th century.