Many of the first wave of Portuguese immigrants carried very little if any documentation with them. They were most likely poor and illiterate. The people in Hawaiian taking information from these immigrants usually had no prior knowledge of the language. Portuguese enunciation was different from what they were used to. Also, the recorder wasn’t always…
Tag: Spelling Variations
The Demotion of X, Y, and Z in Portuguese Names
I’ve been working exclusively with the records of Achada in the Azores for the last month. I’ve worked from the 1870s back to the early 1700s. I’m getting a snapshot of spelling conventions and how things change over time. It’s interesting to me to see how widely used the letters x, y, and z were…
