“Established Love”– a Marriage Proposal through a Letter

a Linguistic-Philological Analysis

Abstract

For centuries the human being has recorded his achievements through writing. All these records represent the memory of humanity and constitute a vast documentary collection, classified by UNESCO as a cultural heritage. Several supports were used, such as stones, marble, bones, padding, skin, palm leaves, turtle shell, papyrus, parchment and paper. The written document represents the record of information which allowed communication across the time and the space. In this sense, analyzing personal letters acknowledges how much writing has become present throughout history, shortening the distance between people. Thus, this article intends to bring to light, according the premises of Textual Philology and Historical Linguistics, the edition of a letter of marriage proposal, including the undated reply to the proposal, and an analysis of the graphematic variations in the text. Even though the letter is not dated, it brings to the surface a habit that is no longer used nowadays, in other words, writing paper based letters and send them by regular mail is no longer a practice of the new generations, but it reveals graphic elements of a phonetic script that indicates the low level of schooling on the part of the scribe.