The Humanistic Concept of the Syllable – Between Grammaticography and Musicology

A Historiographical Analysis of João de Barros's Grammar (1540)

Abstract

The article discusses the sixteenth-century concept of the syllable, which was the fundamental element of prosody, in the work Gramática da língua portuguesa (Barros, 1540) by the humanist João de Barros (c.1496 – 1570), considered the first humanistic grammar to describe the Portuguese language. Our aim is to debate, from a historiographical perspective, how the humanist defined the concept of the syllable, which was initially derived from the Greco-Latin grammatical and philosophical tradition and became an important grammatical metaterm in the description of the sounds of the Portuguese language since the 16th century, when the process of grammatization of natural languages began in the context of the European Renaissance. Its use was continuous until the advent of contemporary Linguistics, remaining to this day a didactic tool for the acquisition of writing. We will analyze the linguistic thought of João de Barros, and how the humanist reinterprets and adapts specific issues of Greco-Latin prosody to employ in the linguistic description of the Portuguese language. For the analysis of this description, we use the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Historiography of Linguistics, proposing a Koernian analysis on the subject, which links the syllable not only to 16th-century grammar but also to singing and music.