Anchieta and the arrival of metalanguage in Brazil: a historiographical and ecolinguistic analysis of the concepts of noun and verb in the Arte de gramática da língua mais usada na costa do Brasil (1595)

Abstract

The theme of the article is the analysis of the introduction of metalanguage in Brazil, in the "Arte de gramática da língua mais usada na costa do Brasil" (Anchieta, 1990 [1595]), by the Jesuit missionary and Renaissance humanist S. José de Anchieta (1534 – 1597), whose grammatical work can be considered the cornerstone of grammaticography in Brazil. The fact that the grammar deals with an indigenous language can be linked to the linguistic policy of the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022 – 2032 and to the ecological and cultural reflections of the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ on care for our common home. To establish an analysis of the metalanguage employed by Anchieta in his grammar, we selected two concepts from the Greco-Latin grammatical tradition, the concepts of noun and verb, which were adapted for the description of the Tupinambá language. We present the theoretical debate on how the concepts of noun and verb were adapted by the sixteenth-century grammarian in the description of the indigenous language.