The first list of Malayalam words at the end of 15th century by a Portuguese seaman (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
MS-804 from the Municipal Library of Porto, Portugal, is a unique copy of the journal of the first voyage to India under Vasco da Gama’s (ca. 1460–1524) command. It describes the voyage subsequent to the departure from the Tagus River, Portugal, on 8 July 1497 until the return up the shallows of the Grande River de Buba, Guinea, on 25 April 1499. The author of the original of this account is probably Álvaro Velho (fl. 1497/1507), born in Barreiro, but the arguments are still weak, being only achieved by deduction. The copyist is also probably John Theotonius, CRSA. The great merit of this document is the fact that the author was a direct eyewitness of all events. In the last appendix, at folio 45, it has a list of 122 useful daily words and expressions in Portuguese and their translation into Malayalam, a provincial Dravidian language spoken in Kerala State, India. It is a relevant testimony of a variety of Malayalam at the end of the 15th century, despite certain transcription mistakes and the scribe’s censorship of some vulgarisms. In this new semi-diplomatic edition, I applied rigorous transcription criteria and corrected earlier editions, adding English translations and Malayalam equivalences.
The first wordlist of Malayalam , written by a Portuguese seaman at the end of the 15 th century
2017
MS-804 from the Municipal Library of Porto, Portugal, is a unique copy of the journal of the first voyage to India under Vasco da Gama’s (ca. 1460–1524) command. It describes the voyage subsequent to the departure from the Tagus River, Portugal, on 8 July 1497 until the return up the shallows of the Grande River de Buba, Guinea, on 25 April 1499. The author of the original of this account is probably Álvaro Velho (fl. 1497/1507), born in Barreiro, but the arguments are still weak, being only achieved by deduction. The copyist is also probably John Theotonius, CRSA. The great merit of this document is the fact that the author was a direct eyewitness of all events. In the last appendix, at folio 45, it has a list of 122 useful daily words and expressions in Portuguese and their translation into Malayalam, a provincial Dravidian language spoken in Kerala State, India. It is a relevant testimony of a variety of Malayalam at the end of the 15th century, despite certain transcription mist...
The Verbal System of the Indo-Portuguese Creoles of the Malabar
The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar were formed in a situation of language contact between the Portuguese colonisers and the native community of the Malabar Coast in the 16th century; nowadays, they are limited to a few last speakers in Cannanore. This dissertation aims to contribute to their linguistic description, which until now has benefited from Schuchardt’s work (1882, 1883, 1889a, 1889b) and from recent fieldwork-based descriptions by Hugo Cardoso (since 2006). In this study, we will use the linguistic data from the oral corpus available from the latter fieldwork in Cochin and Cannanore and kept at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. Our goal is the description of the verbal system of the creoles of the Malabar (CM), which will amount to the characterisation of its verbal morphology and syntax of the predicate. As we shall see, the verbal morphosyntax is almost exclusively analytic, i.e., preverbal and postverbal markers carry temporal, modal and aspectual values associated with the verb. Besides the synchronic description, by adopting a comparative perspective, grammatical structures will be analysed in comparison with the Malayalam substrate/adstrate as well as with their Portuguese etymology, in order to understand the origin(s) of verbal forms and structures. It will be demonstrated that when it comes to grammatical functions and syntactic structure, the CM have converged with Malayalam on a large scale (e.g. in the SOV order). Keywords: Malabar creoles, Indo-Portuguese creoles, verbal system, linguistic convergence, Malayalam
Susheel Kumar Sharma "[The discovery of India] profoundly agitated the hearts and minds of the people of Europe. The rude multitude were stirred by an uncontrollable lust of riches and spirit of adventure; and the cultivated by the sense of renewed faith and hope in the divine deliverance of the world, at the moment when Christendom was almost sinking into the old despair of human destiny and duty that marked the decline of Imperial Rome. For all men the sphere of human intelligence and sympathy was permanently and indefinitely enlarged. The Spanish and Portuguese discoveries of the Indies were, for Europe indeed, nothing less than the revelation of a new moral world, and the definite emancipation of the human soul from the ghostly trammels of its obsequious bondage to secular and religious dogmatism through all the dark centuries of the middle ages." (Birdwood 256-257) The discovery of a new sea route rounding Africa from Western Europe to India in 1498 left an indelible impact not only on the European life but also on the Indian polity, economy and social life. For Europeans the discovery meant that the Portuguese would not need to cross the highly disputed Mediterranean nor the dangerous Arabian Peninsula and that the entire voyage could be made by sea. This resulted in the proclamation of the King Manuel of Portugal as the 'Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India' and he soon became "the wealthiest ruler of Europe" (Saraiva 334) and earned for himself the sobriquet of "the Spice King". The import of this appellation can be gauged from the following remark of George Birdwood that amplifies the power relation between spices and the rulers: "…the history of modern Europe, and emphatically of England, is the history of the quest of the aromatic gum resins and balsams, and condiments and spices, of India, Further [sic]India, and the Indian Archipelago" (101) A new era of global imperialism started taking shape in the form of the Portuguese expansion on the Western Ghats in India from the present-day Kozhikode (or Calicut, the place where Vasco da Gama landed, "the name of which port was well known in Europe" Oaten 72) to Div in the north and up to Coromandel (the coast line of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) though it was not always welcome. Gama was generously received with a grand procession of at least 3,000 armed Nairs by the Zamorin, the Hindu king of Calicut, but the presents that Gama was to send to the Zamorin as gifts from King Manuel ("twelve pieces of lambel [a striped cloth], four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case containing six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey," Ravenstein 60), were trivial and failed to impress the Zamorin's factor, the Moor. Da Gama was jeered into shame as Zamorin's men burst out laughing, pointing out that even the poorest Arab merchants knew that nothing less than pure gold was admissible at court. Many also suggested that he was a pirate and not a royal ambassador. (Ravenstein 119, Correa 200, janson.no) Gama again tried to impress the Zamorin with his gifts "consisting of amber, corals, and many other things" (Ravenstein 70) but the latter refused even to have a look at them and suggested that they should have been sent to his factor. (Idem) As unlike other foreign traders da Gama failed to pay taxes in gold he was refused the right to establish a factory 1. Annoyed by this, da Gama carried a few (the number ranges from five to twenty, Ravenstein 181, Correa 204) hostages (a few Nairs and sixteen fishermen (mukkuva) with him by force (crossingtheoceansea.com). During his next trip in 1502 da Gama was even crueller with competing traders and local inhabitants. He humiliated the Hindu Zamorin's high priest, Talappana Namboothiri, who had helped the former to meet Zamorin during his much celebrated first visit by calling him a spy; at his orders the high priest's lip and ears were cut off; the priest was let off after sewing a pair of dog's ears to his head. (Correa 363, Hunter History 109, Playne 366, thehistoryjunkie.com) Birdwood correctly uses the simile of "hungry wolves among the well-stocked sheep" to describe the Portuguese venture into the Indian Ocean. (165) The Portuguese who raised their warehouses at Kozhikode in 1500 and Kannur (Cannanore) in 1502, constructed three forts in 1503 (at Kollam/Quilon, Kottapuram/ Cranganore and Kochi/Cochin) and two in 1505 (at Anjediva Island and Kannur) to provide protection to their people who had conflicting interests with Arab and Indian traders. Alfonso De Albuquerque 2 , the second Governor, followed the threefold policy: of combating Muslims (the major political impediment) and their Hindu allies, spreading Christianity, and securing the trade of spices by establishing a Portuguese colony in India (Estado Português da Índia). In 1510, Albuquerque seized Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur and "started a reign of terror, burning 'heretics,' crucifying Brahmins, using false theories to forcibly convert the lower castes, razing temples to build churches upon them and encouraging his soldiers to take Indian mistresses." (Gautier stephen-knapp.com) Denison Ross describes him as "the great Albuquerque" (15 & 17) because of his having established Portuguese naval superiority by quelling the Muslim (Moorish) powers that controlled the Arabian Sea. He also credits him for abolition of Sati 3 : "Albuquerque and his immediate successors left almost untouched the customs of the people of Goa, only abolishing, as did the English later, the rite of sati" (Ross 17-18) though the historical facts reveal entirely a different picture regarding the social and cultural persecution of the people as is also hinted in the following observation of Ross: "Albuquerque did everything in his power to encourage his Portuguese to take Indian wives." (11) Ross as a matter of fact is slightly off the mark in his observation as he should have written: "Albuquerque did everything in his power to encourage and compel Indians to accept Portuguese as sons-in-law or husbands." A large number of New Christian Portuguese 4 were also coming to India because they were being discriminated against on the basis of their faith as is clear from King Manuel's letter (dated February 18, 1519): "prohibiting the naming of New Christians to the position of judge, town councillor or municipal registrar in Goa, stipulating, however, that those already appointed were not to be dismissed." (Saraiva 347) António José Saraiva writes: "Upon [Albuquerque's] death at Goa the city had a permanent Luso-Indian population, an administration and divers industries." (Saraiva 343) Proselytising: A Mission to Swap: The Papal Bull, Romanus pontifex, written by Pope Nicholas V in 1454 granted the patronage of the propagation of the Christian faith in Asia to the Portuguese and rewarded them with a trade monopoly in newly discovered areas. They used all their might in establishing their superiority in trade and to control the sea routes and the local markets. Danvers quotes Nawáb Muhabbat Khán to highlight how they were taking on the Muslim rulers: "… Christians became more audacious in their persecution of the Muhammadans, in so far that they stretched out their rapacious hands to plunder on their return from Jedda some ships of the Emperor Jalal-ud din Muhammad Akbar, which had sailed to Mecca without their permission, and they treated Musulmans with great severity and contempt. They burnt down the port of Adilabad Farain, which belonged to 'Adil Shah, and entirely destroyed it. In the guise of merchants, they also came to Dabal, and wished, by cunning and deceitful means, to obtain possession of it; …" (emphasis added 2:33) The Doctrine of Padroado (jus patrionatus established by the Papal Bulls of 1514) provided the authority for missionary work to be in the hands of the Portuguese Crown in areas where Portugal claimed political rights. (vgweb.org). The first Luz church was built by the Portuguese in 1516 in Thirumayilai (Mylapore). Missionaries of the newly founded Society of Jesus (1534) were sent to Goa and the Portuguese colonial government supported the mission with incentives like rice donations for the poor, good positions in the Portuguese colonies for the middle class, and military support for local rulers. (Daus 61-66) St. Francis Xavier was very clear in his mind when he wrote: "I want to free the poor Hindus from the stranglehold of the Brahmins and destroy the places where evil spirits are worshipped." (Francis Xavier qtd by Michael Kerrigan) Denison Ross writes: "It may be recalled … that after the arrival of the Franciscan missionaries in 1517 Goa had become the centre of an immense propaganda, and already in 1540 by the orders of the king of Portugal all the Hindu temples in the island of Goa had been destroyed." (18) Fr. Diogo da Borba and his advisor Vicar General, Miguel Vaz drew plans for converting the Hindus to Christianity. "In a letter dated March 8, 1546 King João III ordered the Viceroy to forbid Hinduism ('Gentile idolatry') in all the Portuguese possessions of India, destroy Hindu temples, prohibit the celebration of Hindu feasts, expel all Brahmins and severely punish anyone making Hindu image." (Saraiva 348) "The viceroy, D. Constantino de Bragança passed a decree in 1559 ordering the destruction of remaining temples and idols." (Mendonça 260) However, Victor Ferrao, Dean Patriarchal Seminary of Rachol, disputes the claim by saying: "… the word Hindu does not exist in the entire sixteenth century Indo-Portuguese historiography." (nizgoenkar.org) He further holds: "Though the temples that were demolished were not Hindu, but [the] one(s) that belonged to different cults that have united into Hinduism of today the Hindu community is certainly carrying the pain of this false impression … ." (nizgoenkar.org) The Kapaleeswarar (Shiva) temple (Mylapore, Chennai) was...
The Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar: Historical cues and questions
2019
THIS ESSAY PROVIDES a state-of-the-art of current research on the Indo-Portuguese creoles of the Malabar. Having been given up as extinct, these creoles have been off the radar of linguists and historians alike for a long while. Yet, they are particularly important as potential descendants of the earliest forms of contact varieties of Portuguese that formed in Asia in the sixteenth century, and raise questions that interact with a social historiography of the Indo-Portuguese communities of the region. This essay will focus on four aspects of the study of these languages which operate on a linguistic-historical interface: (a) the social conditions required for their formation; (b) their course after the end of Portuguese colonial rule; (c) their putative foundational role in the context of Luso-Asian creoles; and (d) the social and linguistic stratification encapsulated in modern and late nineteenth-century records. This discussion is meant as a step towards the integration of linguistic evidence into the study of Indo-Portuguese social history, and of historical evidence into the study of Indo-Portuguese linguistics.
Polyglossic Malabar: Arabi-Malayalam and the Muhiyuddinmala in the age of transition (1600s-1750s).
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 30 / Issue 3, 2020
This article examines the relations between trade, faith, and textual traditions in early modern Indian Ocean region and the birth of Arabi-Malayalam, a new system of writing which has facilitated the growth of a vernacular Islamic textual tradition in Malabar since the seventeenth century. As a transliterated scriptorial-literary tradition, Arabi-Malayalam emerged out of the polyglossic lingual sphere of the Malabar Coast, and remains as one of the important legacies of social and religious interactions in pre-colonial south Asia. The first part of this article examines the social, epistemic and normative reasons that led to the scriptorial birth of Arabi-Malayalam, moving beyond a handful of Malayalam writings that locate its origin in the social and economic necessities of Arab traders in the early centuries of Islam. The second part looks at the complex relationship between Muslim scribes and their vernacular audience in the aftermath of Portuguese violence and destruction of Calicut-one of the largest Indian Ocean ports before the sixteenth century. This part focuses on Qadi Muhammed bin Abdul Aziz and his Muhiyuddinmala, the first identifiable text in Arabi-Malayalam, examining how the Muhiyuddin-mala represents a transition from classical Arabic theological episteme to the vernacular-popular poetic discourse which changed the pietistic behaviour of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar. This article proposes that the transregional and trans-local mobility of Malabar trading communities in the Indian Ocean region facilitated a complex range of translingual recipro-cities that finally resulted in the emergence of what is generally known as Arabi-Malayalam literature.
The Indo-Portuguese language of Diu
"On the southern tip of the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat (India) and commanding a strategic lookout over the Arabian sea, the small island of Diu has aroused seemingly disproportionate colonial interests throughout its history. Among the various effects of its long domination by faraway Portugal (1535-1961) was the formation of a local variety of Indo-Portuguese, a contact language resulting from the encounter of various linguistic influences, chief among which Gujarati and Portuguese. Although the Portuguese-lexified creoles of Asia have deserved scholarly attention from the late 19th-century, the trend towards accurate linguistic description of these languages is a recent one. This study provides a linguistic account of present-day Diu Indo-Portuguese, duly embedded in its reconstructed historical and sociodemographic context, with the intention to contribute to our burgeoning understanding of the formation, development and present vitality of the contact languages of (South) Asia and elsewhere."
Irreverent History: Essays for M. G. S. Narayanan, 2014
Historical linguistics has much to offer the discipline of history but the languagescape of the medieval Indian Ocean world is only beginning to be an explicit topic of study. Focusing on the adoption of two Indic loanwords into twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic, the article identifies the Malayalam and Tulu common nouns from which the terms tālam and fātiya derive, and then proceeds to examine the wider history of their journey into the western Indian Ocean, ending in the thirteenth-century Nile Delta. This essay is part of a Festschrift for the great historian of Keralan and South Indian history, M. G. S. Narayanan. It is made available here by the publisher as a "sample chapter" from the forthcoming volume.