A trecentist monument: the linguistic heritage of Serafim da Silva Neto’s manuscripts

Abstract

Livro das Aves, Diálogos de São Gregório and Flos Sanctorum undoubtedly comprise a monumental treasure, to which the writing and the historical solidification of the Portuguese language yield meaning. Diverted from the original space of production in the Portuguese Middle Age, they transported, from the 14^th century to the present, a language in the veiled silence of parchment, and since 1950, such documents are the oldest written in Portuguese language in Brazil. Considering that monuments not only represent a crystallized history consisted of social confluences and non-confluences, but, especially, allow the apprehension of the movements and the contours of societies that construct them, some linguistic aspects are therefore discussed in order to prove the greater value of this documental collection, resting on the possibility that such documents represent the variation and the change processes in the historical constitutional procedures of the Portuguese language, during a period when the controls of a standard norm was still in an embryonic stage. The linguistic-literary memory they carry reveals the vivacity of language phenomena, whose rules and standards have not disappeared but continue to propagate in Brazilian Portuguese, as evidenced by the several researches in Historical Linguistics based on these documents, in Brazil and abroad.