QUESTÕES LÉXICO-CULTURAIS EM CARTA DO DESCOBRIMENTO DO BRASIL

Abstract

The arrival of the first Iberian fleets in Brazilian land and the encounter with the native’s
date from April 22, 1500. Data referring to this meeting between different men,
experiencing different civilization processes are recorded in the Letter of Discovery, written by Pero Vaz de Caminha and addressed to the Lusitanian King Dom Manuel,
informing him about this land, found; because long imagined and sought after, and its
inhabitants, located in the fourth part of the world (Cortesão, 1943). Given such
historical context, this communication will deal with the use of certain vocabulary forms
that made it possible for Caminha, through the strategy of comparison, to tell Dom
Manuel about the man, objects, and plants of the Island of Vera Cruz. It is due to such
linguistic strategy that the absence of the word “Indian” was noticed in the mentioned
text, registered in Bluteau (1728) as natural of India and, only in the second meaning
does it refer to the native we also call Indians the peoples of America. The word
headdress has been named as feather hood. Doing so, Caminha projected the
unknown by the known and identified, through the comparative process, relations
between the headdress, the hood and the hat. Although they have distinct functions,
according to their use in each society - decorating, protecting from the cold and
protecting from the sun, respectively - these objects are similar in terms of their place
in the body. The theoretical-methodological fundamentals that provided the
development of this research were those of textual-discursive linguistics, in an
interface with those of lexiculture and lexicology (TURAZZA, 1996).