70 Augusto Soares da Silva
cant) and also reveals that French influence is not weaker in BP than it is in
EP. Tables 10 and 11 provide the most significant result, confirming the
hypothesis of the Brazilian variety’s greater receptivity to loanwords,
whether through direct importation or adaptation.
As regards the adaptation of foreign terms, Table 12 illustrates the
greater tendency of BP to adapt foreign borrowings, in contrast with EP
which tends to replace them by vernacular terms. The percentage of
adapted borrowings from English in the field of football increases dramati-
cally in BP between 1950 and 1970. For the overall 21 onomasiological
profiles, we find 23 adaptations and 19 loan translations in BP against 6
adaptations and 14 loan translations in EP.
Table 13 presents some examples of adaptation/translation of English
loans in BP, and their replacement by vernacular expressions in EP. The
loan offside is an exception: it is replaced by a vernacular expression in BP,
and is translated in EP.
Finally, the proven high influence of foreign terms in BP on the football
and clothing terms may be associated with two sociolinguistic phenomena
which are taking place in Brazil. On the one hand, attitudes of linguistic
purism are emerging (see section 2). On the other hand, attempts to imple-
ment them seem to be a complete failure, which is fully supported by the
results presented in this section.
4.3. Other item-related features
We will now measure the proportions of three other item-related features:
archaism, neologism and Brazilian terms. BP is the variety with the largest
number of football terms that became obsolete between 1950 and 2000.
The results leave no doubt at all (the ‘archaism’ feature identifies the terms
that become obsolete in the time period considered): A’arch (B50) = 21.7%
and A’arch (B00) = 0.2%, against A’arch (P50) = 5.7% and A’arch (P00) =
2.1%. If we include in this calculation all the foreign borrowings that be-
come obsolete, asymmetry becomes even stronger: the percentage of A’arch
(B50) increases by 34.4%, while the percentage of A’arch (P50) remains the
same with 6%. To a certain extent, this result contributes to the conver-
gence in the field of football. These changes, together with the changes
observed earlier as regards the question of foreign borrowings are sugges-
tive of greater flexibility from the Brazilian variety.