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Portuguese language

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages ). It is the mother tongue of about 170 million people, chiefly in Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil (154 million speakers); and in Portugal's former overseas provinces in Africa and Asia—Angola, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe—(about 5 million speakers). (These nations are members of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, which was founded 1996.) Although the Portuguese spoken in Portugal differs to some extent from the Portuguese current in Brazil, with reference to pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, the differences are not major. The Portuguese spelling reform agreed to in 1990 simplifies the spelling of both Brazilian and European/African Portuguese, and greatly reduces the differences in orthography between the two forms. A distinctive phonetic feature of…
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Full text Article Portuguese language

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages ). It is the mother tongue of about 170 million people, chiefly in Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil (154 million speakers); and in…
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Full text Article Portuguese language

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
| 95 words
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Full text Article PORTUGUESE: A Baroque Language

From Dictionary of Untranslatables
➤ BAROQUE , DASEIN , DESTINY , FICAR , HÁ , MALAISE [ SAUDADE ], MANIERA , POETRY , SPANISH The Portuguese language, by virtue of its flexible syntax, the inversions of its pun... …
| 6,176 words
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Full text Article Portuguese language

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
| 51 words
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Full text Article Portugal

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Portugal
Country, on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula , southwestern Europe. Area: 35,603 sq mi (92,212 sq km). Population: (2016 est.) 10,302,000. Capital: Lisbon . Most of the people are Portuguese. Language: Portuguese (official). Religion: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic). Currency: …
| 412 words , 2 images
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Full text Article Castilho, António Feliciano de

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born Jan. 28, 1800, Lisbon—died June 18, 1875, Lisbon) Portuguese poet. Though blind from childhood, he became a classical scholar and by age 16 was publishing poems, translations, and pedagogical works. With his Obras completas (1837; “Complete Works”), he became a literary figure in Lisbon. As…
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Full text Article Rhodes, Alexandre de

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born March 15, 1591, Avignon, France—died March 5, 1660, Eṣfahān, Iran) French missionary, the first Frenchman to visit Vietnam. He established a Jesuit mission in the region in 1619 and later estimated that he had converted some 6,700 Vietnamese to Roman Catholicism. Expelled in 1630, he spent 10…
| 176 words
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Full text Article Sao Tome and Principe

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Sao Tome and Principe
Island country, central Africa. It is situated on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea , west of the African mainland. Area: 386 sq mi (1,001 sq km). Population: (2016 est.) 198,000. Capital: São Tomé . Most of the people are Forro, a mixture of African and European ancestry, or Angolares, the…
| 278 words , 2 images
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Full text Article Camoens

From Chambers Biographical Dictionary
Camões, Luis de 1524-80 Portuguese poet Born in Lisbon, he studied for the church at Coimbra, but declined to take orders. Returning to Lisbon, probably in 1542, he fell in love with Donna Caterina Ataide, but her father opposed the marriage. He was banished from Lisbon for a year, and joining a…
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Full text Article Polkinhorn, Harry

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
(3 March 1945) Among the strongest of the new VISUAL POETS to emerge in the 1980s, Polkinhorn also wrote traditional verse, having produced a highly original antiwar epic, Anaesthesia (1985), which is composed of phrases, rather than poetic “lines,” and is marked by unobvious turns. Bridges of Skin…
| 253 words
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