The Portuguese lexicon under the eyes of Gaetano Osculati: elements of fauna and flora

Abstract

The Amazon River and its huge watershed, lined with imposing forests, have always fascinated everyone who has heard of it. From its discoverer Vicente Pinzón, who in 1500 named it the Rio Santa Maria del Mar Dulce, until these days, adventurers, biologists, cartographers, geographers, indianists and many other scientists have searched its waters for information that could
explain the grandeur of this work of nature. The fascination of this Sea-River also attracted the Italian traveler Gaetano Osculati, who on October 26 1847 began his canoe trip along the Napo River-which has its source in Ecuador near Mount Cotopaxi and empties into the Rio Solimões. Gaetano Osculati, mirroring  himself in Orellana, does the same, and at the end of his four-year journey writes
Esplorazioni delle Regioni Equatoriali lungo il Napo ed il fi ume delle Amazzoni, published in Milan in 1854, from which we collected the Portuguese lexicon inserted incidentally or voluntarily in the book. When writing about what he observed, in the absence of terms in the Italian language, the explorer uses new
words, transcribing in the way he hears them. Usually, there is a close connection between naming and narrating in the narrative: in naming, the narrator concentrates on the word a series of linguistic signs, their cultural charge, their knowledge and their expressive capacity. In this article, in light of the theories by Alves (1990; 2010), Klajn (1972 and Nunes (1996), we intend to collect, register and classifythe lexical loans of Portuguese and Tupi in the work of Gaetano Osculati, with the main aim of contributing to the study of the Portuguese and Italian historical lexicology, and in particular to recover the Portuguese lexical loans used by the Italian traveler.