Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Many years ago, I wanted to learn Portuguese quickly, based on my existing knowledge of Spanish. I went to a professor at MIT that had taught a linguistics class I took (I wish I could remember who), and he give me a photocopy of an article "Portugués al Instante" ("Instant Portuguese") written by Leo Gilson Ribeiro. It seems to have been published in a magazine, but there was insufficient information on the photocopy to trace that, too.
It was a poor photocopy, and had some smudges at places the copy had been creased, plus the right hand edge of the article was clipped off. So one had to use one's imagination.
I spent considerable time in the last couple of weeks creating a readable restoration of this document. I had found invaluable in my own learning so many years ago because it allowed me to rapidly synthesize some scaffolding, to guess many words that might be present in Portuguese and to recognize them if I saw them. I was unable to find it anywhere on the modern web, and I've put it in the archival GitHub repository of documents I call "Kent's History Project", which are things I need to get rid of and didn't want to be lost to history.
Separately, I've also hosted the document on my personal web site, since there may be special interest in this separate from the larger project:
http://nhplace.com/kent/History/portuguese/portugues_al_instante.html
The repository version includes a README.md that details some useful information about how the restoration was done. The document itself contains a place you can click in the upper right corner of the document to reveal metadata about the restoration details, as some of it was heuristically recovered, but the text will probably read better (especially for sight-impaired readers) without that additional text active..
https://github.com/netsettler/netsettlement/tree/main/portuguese
#Spanish #Portuguese #Translation #KentsHistoryProject #history #linguistics #languages
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