Reforms of Portuguese Orthography - Orthographic Standardization - Basic Principles

Basic Principles

The authors of the first spelling reform of Portuguese, imbued with the modern ideas of phonology, rejected the etymological spellings current in the previous centuries, preferring a more phonetic orthography, like those of Spanish and Italian. On the other hand, considering that the period of Galician-Portuguese troubadorian poetry had been a golden age of Portuguese literature, they aimed to keep the new orthography as close to the medieval spelling as possible, in spite of some phonetic changes which the language had undergone. The resulting orthographic standard was essentially a compromise between these intents, on one hand, and common traditions, on the other: in a few cases, spelling conventions which went against etymology but had long become customary were made official.

Thus, the reform kept some graphemic distinctions for phonological traits which were not present in every dialect, but still present in at least some ares: between z and intervocalic s (/dz/ and /z/ in medieval Portuguese, but now reduced to /z/ in most dialects), between c/ç and s(s) (/ts/ and /s/ in medieval Portuguese, but now reduced to /s/ in most dialects), and between ch and x (originally /tʃ/ and /ʃ/, now just /ʃ/ in most dialects, although the distinction is still retained in some). The unstressed vowels e and o were also retained for word-family homogeneity and etymology when they were pronounced as i or u, respectively, and the digraph ou was differentiated from o, even though many speakers now pronounced both as /o/. These distinctions have close parallels in the orthographies of other West European languages.

Since word stress can be distinctive in Portuguese, the acute accent was used to mark the stressed vowel whenever it doesn't fall over the predicted vowel, more or less as in the orthographies of Spanish and Catalan. For example, the verb critica "he criticizes" bears no accent mark, because it is stressed on the syllable before the last one, like most words that end in -a, but the noun crítica "criticism" requires an accent mark, since it is a proparoxytone.

Since the height of the vowels a, e and o is also distinctive in stressed syllables (see Portuguese phonology), high stressed vowels were marked with a circumflex accent, â, ê, ô, to be differentiated from the low stressed vowels written á, é, ó. The choice of the acute for low vowels and the circumflex for high vowels went against the conventions of other Romance languages such as French or Italian, but it was already commonplace in Portuguese before the 20th century. (In many words, Portuguese ê and ô correspond to the Latin long vowels ē, ō.)

Nasal vowels and nasal diphthongs usually appear before the orthographic nasal consonants n, m, in which case they do not need to be identified with diacritics, but the tilde was placed on nasal a and nasal o when they occurred before another letter, or at the end of a word. Although the vowel u can also be nasal before other vowels, this happens in so few words (mui, muito, muita, muitos, muitas) that marking its nasality was not considered necessary.

The acute accent was used also to mark the second vowel of a hiatus in a stressed syllable, where a diphthong would normally be expected, distinguishing for example conclui "he concludes" from concluí "I concluded", saia "that he leave" from saía "he used to leave", or fluido "fluid" from fluído "flowed".

Initially, the orthographic system, both in Brazil and Portugal, determined the usage of diacritics in cases where two words would otherwise be homographic but not homophonous, such as acôrdo, "agreement", distinguishing it from acórdo, "I wake up". This principled was abandoned in all but a dozen cases in 1945 in Portugal and in 1973 in Brazil.

The orthography set by the 1911 reform is essentially the one still in use today on both sides of the Atlantic with only minor adjustments having been made to the vowels, consonants, and digraphs. Where there have been substantial changes since then, and there were still currently significant differences between the Portuguese orthography and the Brazilian orthography until de 1990 spelling reform, was in the use of diacritics and silent consonants.