Reforms of Portuguese Orthography - Historical Background

Historical Background

Portuguese began to be used regularly in documents and poetry around the 12th century. In 1290, King Diniz created the first Portuguese University in Lisbon (later moved to Coimbra) and decreed that Portuguese, then called simply the "Common language" would henceforth be used instead of Latin, and named the "Portuguese language." In 1296, it was adopted by the Royal Chancellary and began to be used for writing laws and in notaries.

The medieval spelling of Portuguese was not uniform, since it had no official standard, but most authors used an essentially phonemic orthography, with minor concessions to etymology common in other Romance languages, such as the use of c for /ts/ before e or i, but ç otherwise, or the use of ss for /s/ between vowels, but s otherwise. King Diniz, who was an admirer of the poetry of the troubadours and a poet himself, popularized the Occitan digraphs nh and lh for the palatal consonants /ɲ/ and /ʎ/, which until then had been spelled with several digraphs, including nn and ll, as in Spanish.

During the Renaissance, appreciation for classical culture led many authors to imitate Latin and (Romanized) Ancient Greek, filling words with a profusion of silent letters and other etymological graphemes, such as ch (pronounced as c/qu), ph (pronounced as f), rh, th, y (pronounced as i), cc, pp, tt, mn (pronounced as n), sce, sci (pronounced as ce, ci), bt, pt, mpt (pronounced as t), and so on, still found today in the orthographies of French and English.

Contrary to neighboring languages such as Spanish or French, whose orthographies were set by language academies in the 17th century, Portuguese had no official spelling until the early 20th century; authors wrote as they pleased.