Said Ali: around an event and a path

Abstract

To analyze a certain path of Said Ali’s work, decisive in the history of the linguistic ideas in Brazil, I take two events. The publication of the Gramática Secundária (a normative grammar, which he calls practice), and the publication of Estrutura da Língua Portuguesa, by Mattoso Câmara, in 1970. With this analysis, we seek to reflect on the issue of purism, on the one hand, and the consideration of a linguistic standard in Said Ali’s work, on the other hand. We can observe that, if he considers the question of the linguistic standard, of a written language as a model, he is radically against the purism of the language, considering its history and its relations with other languages. After the path done, we can consider that the meaning of the event that we take for analysis has in his past the works published in Dificuldades da Língua Portuguesa, Lexeologia do português histórico and Formação das palavras e sintaxe do português histórico; in his present, the enunciation of the definitions of grammar; and in the future what the event projects as meaning, in this case, among other things, the realization of a descriptive grammar of the Portuguese language. An important aspect of his work is the way in which a psychological subject of the language and a subject of the language, the people, operate in it, with all its divisions. Taking his work in the conditions of his time, we see how he is decisive and projects other conditions for the descriptions of Portuguese in Brazil.