# Old Portuguese dernɛro



## john welch

A map from 1547 has _Riodernɛro _at a river. Possibly the_ ɛr_ is a form of _eir_ ,_ dinheiro,_which was replaced after 1433, over a century previously. Another river on the map is _Rio Rial_, but Galician_ ria _is "river" and it may be _Rio Rea_l with the spelling used in trade, "rial". Could _dernɛro_ have another meaning than _dinheiro_?


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## Carfer

You mean the map in Nicolas Vallard's 1547 Atlas, which is supposed to represent a Portuguese chart of the coast of Australia (or maybe Java)? No, I don't think that it means '_dinheiro_'.  Vallard was French and the names of geographical features in that map (as _'cap', 'illa_') are actually written in Catalan. One of them is '_Rio dernero_', indeed, but I don't think '_ernero_' is a Portuguese word. I'll try to gather more information on this matter.

P.S. '_Enero_' could be the Catalan word for January, '_Rio de enero_', _'Rio de janeiro_' in Portuguese.


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## Ari RT

My bet goes for "the last". Catalan _darrer_, french _dernier._
The bay to the north is called _G:_ (gulf?) _secomdo _(second?).


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## guihenning

It is very unlikely that that's a Portuguese word. I don't think I've ever seen the diphthong [ej] being written as "_ɛr_" in old texts, neither does my Dictionary say that 'dinheiro' has ever had such a short form '_eir_' for 'dinheiro'. DINARIUS could never evolve to 'eir' in Portuguese.
DINHEIRO s.m


> f.hist. sXIII _dinheiro_, sXIII _deneyro_, sXIII _dinheyro_, 1331 _dijnheiro_, sXIV _dieiro._


(HOUAISS)_._

Given the fact that Latin intervocalic 'n' fell out of Portuguese words by the 11th century or so and that the digraph 'nh', likely imported from Provençal, was chosen to be represented as the palatal nasal consonant [ɲ] already in the 13th century, it is simply not sensible to think that around 1433 the word was still being written with 'n', because back then the digraph 'nh' was already very well established (see the historical forms above).
Texts from the 15th century also massively chose 'ey' to write the [ej] diphthong, which has always existed, being later on replaced by modern "ei".
Latin IANUARIUM > *jannarium can only evolve to 'Janeiro' in Portuguese, so that can't be it either.

P.S. The closest word Portuguese ever had to «_eir»_ was '_eire_' from Latin HERI (_FR hier, IT ieri, ES ayer, CA ahir_) meaning 'yesterday' which by the 15th century had already been long supplanted by '_ooyte_' (modern PT '_ontem_') from Latin AD NOCTEM (_ES anoche, OldFR anuit_).

So I go with Carfer and Ari, it is likely to be a Catalan word, not a Portuguese one. It simply doesn't go with Portuguese's phonotactics.


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## Carfer

I also think that '_dinheiro_' wouldn't be a likely name for a geographical location. You see, a considerable number of regions previously unknown to the Europeans were named, among others, after saints, dates, sovereigns, discoverers, the main trade or the most valuable goods extracted from the area, like Costa do Ouro (Golden Coast), Costa do Marfim (Ivory Coast), Costa dos Escravos (Slaves Coast). Unlike gold, ivory or slaves, there was no money circulating in these primitive regions (at least, none that the Europeans valued or in the form that Europeans would call money, that is, minted money). Why  then call that river '_dinheiro_' if there was none?


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## john welch

Catalan dialect is a possibility as _reial _is their form of_ real_.  Galician _enero_ also is "January" but the various Iberian pronunciations of the possible spellings don't support _ernero_ for that. Perhaps another dialect is involved or the navigator was just not an academic man.

Dinheiro were made of billon, a gold or silver alloy. Gold reals appeared from 1535.The Dauphin map of 1530 does not have the _rial, dernero_ names which were written after the gold reals were issued. There were gold rushes in that map area, with nuggets lying on the ground in 1850s and still being collected today.

You have found the map but for others the link is:
First map of Australia from Nicholas Vallard’s atlas, 1547, in the Library of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart. at Middle Hill, 1856. - Antique Print Map Room
There are drawings of men with square frames which resemble gold sieves and sieves in a diagram of medieval gold processing equipment.


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## guihenning

john welch said:


> Galician _enero_ also is "January" but the various Iberian pronunciations of the possible spellings don't support _ernero_ for that.


The word for January in Galician is '_xan*ei*ro_', not 'enero'. The loss of the first syllable didn't occur in Portuguese/Galician/Catalan, only in Castilian (ja.ne.ro > e.ne.ro).
The diphthong 'ei' has always been abundant and productive in Portuguese, so I find it suspicious and unlikely that a word like 'dern*ero*' would ever be Portuguese/Galician, since phonotactics won't back that up.
One Portuguese word for 'last' is _derrad*ei*ro (FR dernier, CA darrer)_ but 'derradeiro' has always been written with a diphthong.


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## john welch

Ah, I was looking at a Spanish report about Galicia, so it used Sp _enero_.

The pronunciation flows of Sp _de enero_ and _*de ernero_ are different. Perhaps _dernero_ is Andalusian, where "intervocalic /ɾ/ is also elided". This would reduce the strangeness of _de*r*nero_, which would resemble Port. sXIV_ dieiro._
 And of course the connection with the sea exists there.


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## john welch

"The vowel system of eastern Andalusian distinguishes more timbres than standard Spanish, . The vowel system is made up of ten vowel timbres grouped in pairs, one of the pairs always having an elongated or excessively open timbre (actually articulated with the root of the advanced language). . the vowels acquire a differentiated value between closed and open vowels to differentiate singular and plural: [pje] (foot), [pj*ɛ*] (feet)."
It seems that by co-incidence, _dern*ɛ*ro , ɛ,_ is written using the modern phonetic symbol for front vowel _e._
Origin : _dinero _Roman_ denarius. dēnī "containing ten", _as its value was originally of 10_ assēs _"bronze ingots".


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## guihenning

john welch said:


> The pronunciation flows of Sp _de enero_ and _*de ernero_ are different. Perhaps _dernero_ is Andalusian, where "intervocalic /ɾ/ is also elided"


It is possible. I don't know Andalusian well enough to guess. Anything but Portuguese seems to be plausible. If French has 'dernier', it _could _be that Spanish borrowed it, turning it into 'dernero', (Rio Dernero ('[the] Last River') but I find that far-fetched. If Portuguese had done the same, the result would inevitably be 'dern*ei*ro' (the diphthong is an essential condition), but there are no registers of that word in Portuguese, so…


john welch said:


> This would reduce the strangeness of _de*r*nero_, which would resemble Port. sXIV_ dieiro._


This orthography 'dieiro' is just a fluctuation and was quite common in the 15th/16th century. The pronunciation likely remained almost unaltered throughout the centuries until the 17th when, in Portugal, there was a shift from [ej] to [ɐj] and albeit this shift was significant, it hasn't altered the orthography of any word to this day. There's no evidence that during the 15th century the consonant [ɲ] (written 'nh') was dropped, in the contrary.


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## Penyafort

Carfer said:


> P.S. '_Enero_' could be the Catalan word for January, '_Rio de enero_', _'Rio de janeiro_' in Portuguese.


Never, it's _gener_. Only Spanish lost initial GE/GI-. All other Romance languages in Iberia preserved it: janeiro/xaneiro, xineru, chinero, gener, gèr.


john welch said:


> Catalan dialect is a possibility


If Catalan is a dialect, what is English, a jargon?


Ari RT said:


> My bet goes for "the last". Catalan _darrer_, french _dernier._


My thoughts too. Maybe an attempt to _Lusophonize _the French _dernier_.


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## Carfer

Penyafort said:


> Maybe an attempt to _Lusophonize _the French _dernier_.


It would have to be the other way around. The authorship of the Vallard's Atlas is unknown (Vallard was the owner, not the author). The maps in it are supposed to be copies or adaptations of Portuguese charts by French (from Dieppe) map makers. Assuming the names were written in Portuguese, they could have francised the Portuguese names, misinterpreted or made a mistake in transcribing them. But those names could also be written transcriptions of local native or purely fictitious ones (as the places they depicted can also be, by the way). All those things were quite common at the time. Therefore the assumption that the maps were of Portuguese authorship or based on Portuguese maps doesn't imply that the names in them are Portuguese or even Portuguese based (actually, many words look like Catalan), but, if they are, '_dernero_' doesn't look like a Portuguese word at all.


Penyafort said:


> Never, it's _gener_. Only Spanish lost initial GE/GI-. All other Romance languages in Iberia preserved it: janeiro/xaneiro, xineru, chinero, gener, gèr.



Thank you for the correction. I don't speak Catalan and having asked Google for the name of the month, here is what I got


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## guihenning

Carfer said:


> Thank you for the correction. I don't speak Catalan and having asked Google for the name of the month, here is what I got


Aparentemente o Google acha que espanhol e catalão sejam a mesma coisa. Quem me tem socorrido aqui e ali tem sido o Glosbe: gener


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## john welch

Contact – Rial Chocolates .... in Barcelona.
_Rio Rial _may be Catalan (which is not a dialect. English is not a jargon and has been described as a mongrel and a dog's breakfast).


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## Penyafort

Carfer said:


> Thank you for the correction. I don't speak Catalan and having asked Google for the name of the month, here is what I got
> View attachment 63889





guihenning said:


> Aparentemente o Google acha que espanhol e catalão sejam a mesma coisa. Quem me tem socorrido aqui e ali tem sido o Glosbe: gener



That is why I prefer dictionaries to translators.

It is not that it thinks they are the same thing, it's just that it tries to recognize as much as possible. If I type _marzo _in the Portuguese-Catalan translation, it also recognizes it as a valid Portuguese form, although it also warns me about translating it from Spanish. It has to do with their search engine, I guess.


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## john welch

Spelling variations in Spanish were likely and seen in Port. _dieiro_.

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/45674/626372.pdf?sequence=3

p22. Since Menéndez Pidal (considered as the “father” of Spanish philology), the idea of irregularity and graphic anarchy in the earliest documents in Spain, which date from the 10th and 11th centuries, has been accepted. Menéndez Pidal (1986: 68–69) considered that the writing of those centuries “is characterized by great confusion” and by being “very indecisive, using several representations, sometimes seven or eight at the same time, for the same sound. It is thus in a perfect state of chaos”. We can confirm this state of spelling variation by examining, for example, how writers transcribed new sounds of Hispanic Romance that did not exist in Latin, and for which, obviously, the Latin alphabet did not, in principle, have special letters.

p 35. In the 16th century, the medieval phonological system of Castilian had
evolved to such an extent that Alphonsine spelling no longer reflected the
pronunciation, so it would have been necessary to reform its written representation (Lapesa 1980: 367). This divergence between writing and pronunciation gave rise to a divergence of criteria which has been described as “spelling anarchy” (e.g., by Marcos Marín 1979: 100): some users of
the written language, such as Saint Teresa of Avila, adopted innovative principles and no longer respected the medieval system of writing, .We could say that the graphic vestments that medieval pronunciation had received no longer fitted the phonetic body of a language that had changed.This spelling variation – or “anarchy”, as some authors prefer to call it – would last until the foundation of the Spanish Royal Academy. Hence, the period between the second half of the 16th century and the beginning of the 18th century, when the Academy was founded, has been given in the history of our language the name anarchic period (according to the chronological division of Martínez de Sousa 1991: 42).


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## Penyafort

After looking at the map..., and even considering that Catalan, Portuguese and French were common languages in cartography, it is a really weird map.

Regarding the Catalan words you mentioned:

*- cap *is Catalan, although it could also be French. But what I find weird is that cap has always been masculine and we see femenine adjectives with it.
- *illa *is Catalan, although it might also be Portuguese with a different spelling. What makes it look Portuguese is that sometimes it is followed by "do ...". What makes it look Catalan, apart from the spelling, is that the plural seems to be Illes, as in Tres Illes. Or the use of adjectives like Illa Grossa. (Grossa also exists in Portuguese, but they'd rather say Ilha Grande)
- *rio *is Portuguese, but Catalan *riu *seems to appear a couple of times too. However, they could simply be graphic variants for both languages, as both Portuguese and Catalan say /riu/ or /riw/.
- *terra *and *serra *are both Portuguese and Catalan.

Honestly, we see things like Illes Bajses (Catalanoid), followed by Bonno Porto (Portuguesoid, Italianoid), followed by Cap Bon Espoir (Frenchoid). Not to mention the funny Costa Dangerosa. Either the author had some personal purpose with it, many hands have intervened, or it was all rendered in a fantastic way.


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## Ari RT

Penyafort said:


> Honestly, we see things like Illes Bajses (Catalanoid), followed by Bonno Porto (Portuguesoid, Italianoid), followed by Cap Bon Espoir (Frenchoid). Not to mention the funny Costa Dangerosa. Either the author had some personal purpose with it, many hands have intervened, or it was all rendered in a fantastic way.


Catalanoid / Frechoid etc is a great approach to the theme.
I can imagine seamen using any words within a continuum of eastern european romance languages between themselves and, why not, when they had to refer to places. They're who gave names to the bays and rivers, after all. I can also imagine landmarks being (re)christened several times by different crews. And language A names under language B paradigms, like Costa Dangerosa.
I don't know the history behind this map. If it was intended to be a piece of art, some kind of luxury memorabilia, the author would probably have applied some 'filtering' upon the gibberish and the disordered sea language.
We shouldn't be surprised by the mélange, although, if the main purpose of the map was merely cartography.
I'm aware that cartography comprised a lot of art in the XVI century. We cannot expect a purely technical clean vectorial georeferenced map, but the main purpose is the point. Anyone knows whether it was deemed to be used by sailors or hung in a wall?


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## Carfer

Ari RT said:


> Anyone knows whether it was deemed to be used by sailors or hung in a wall?


So far as I know, all maps like this had a practical purpose, they were nautical charts. They may be heavily decorated, frequently with imaginary plants and creatures and picturesque details, but they were nonetheless meant for practical use by the mariners of the time. As to accuracy, that's quite another matter.


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