The stressed mid vowels of the Modern Portuguese (17th century) from the rhymes of the Baroque Cancioneiro A Fénix Renascida

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the pronunciation of the stressed mid vowels in Portuguese of the 17h century, through the observation of the rhymes of the poetry from that period. The corpus of this research comprise the poems of the book A Fénix Renascida ou obras poéticas dos melhores engenhos portugueses. The methodology adopted in this study was based, essentially, on mapping and analyzing all the rhymes with stressed mid vowels in these literary texts. Data from this study were compared to data from 13th, 15th and 16th centuries (in FONTE, 2010, 2014). The results of this research suggest that there was, until the 17th century (at least) constant phonetic variation in the speech of the stressed mid vowels of the Portuguese language. Throughout history, some of these variations have resulted in change. In these cases, the variant fixed in the current pronunciation does not correspond to the etymological form. In other cases, however, the earliest pronunciation of the language was fixed.