Msgr. Sebastiao Rodolfo Dalgado - 2

 Linguistic Scholar of international renown

Professor Olivinho Gomes

continued from page 1

His funeral in Lisbon was an apotheosis of overwhelming sympathy and honour. Mass was offered by his fellow Goan priests, in his room, that had served as his bedroom and work-place. The Education Ministry, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, the Papal Nunciature and the Faculties of Arts and Sciences, were represented . Funeral orations were delivered by the Deans of the Faculties of the Arts and the Sciences, Lisbon University, and by Canon Santa Rita e Souza, professor at the Colonial School of the University. Newspapers in Goa, Portugal and Brazil wrote copiously in praise of the man and his erudite work that had won plaudits the world over.

The world-renowned Academy of Sciences, Lisbon, conferred on Dalgado its Membership, the highest literary and scientific distinction of Portugal, in 1922 ; he was elected member of the elite Society of Geography in 1895; that of the Coimbra Institute in 1896 and that of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, in 1921; he was appointed Domestic Prelate by the Pope in 1904. At his suggestion, a Chair for Konkani was instituted in the Colonial School of Lisbon University.

His fame rests on the following works of monumental erudition presented in Portuguese : the two voluminous dictionaries mentioned earlier; a Glossario Luso-Asiatico, with Portuguese vis-a-vis many Asian Languages; Influence of Portuguese vocabulary on Asian Languages; Florilegio de Proverbios Concanis (a Bouquet of Konkani proverbs) arranged subject-wise, with explanations in Portuguese and comparison with other Indian and foreign languages; the Indo-Portuguese dialect of Ceylon; a diachronic (historical evolution) Konkani grammar, still lying in manuscript form, including a Portuguese version of the Hitopadesha, the Sanskrit classic. His defence of Konkani as an independent language, was incisive and incontestable, as delineated in his articles in Portuguese in the HERALD (not O HERALDO), on sound scientific arguments that pulverized those of his adversaries. For he was an internationally-acknowledged linguistic scholar but no litterateur in the accepted sense of that term, having no literary work to his credit. Even in Konkani he wrote nothing except doing a rather stilted translation of some lines in Portuguese on a brochure relating to the 4^th centenary of the Portuguese ‘discoveries’ brought out in Lisbon, in Roman script.                               

Despite all the honours bestowed on him for his supernal achievements, Msgr. S.R. Dalgado remained a humble man, a saintly and dedicated priest. It is with the intention of making his scholarly work better known and studied, and to rally and uplift the abandoned Konkani writers in Roman script, that an academy named after him as the Dalgado Konknni Akademi had been set up in 1983 and revived recently, which has launched last Sunday its year-long celebrations of the 150^th birth anniversary of this great Goan and a greater Konkani personality, in this blessed land that gave him birth and today rejoices overwhelmingly in his glory.

Back to TGF Front Page