Luís Lindley Cintra

Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra (5 March 1925 in Lisbon – 18 August 1991) was a prominent figure in Portuguese philology and linguistics. A prolific writer with over 80 published works, he was a keen student of the historical differentiation during the 14th and 15th centuries between literary Portuguese and Castilian Spanish (1958).^[1] Another special interest was the relationship between Galician and Portuguese, as evinced by his study of the dialects of Madeira (1990) and his plan, together with Manuel de Paiva Boléo and José G. Herculano de Carvalho, for a linguistic-ethnographic atlas of Portugal and Galicia (1960).^[1] He is also co-author, with Celso Ferreira da Cunha, of a major work on Portuguese grammar, the Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo.^[1]

Biography

Lindley Cintra earned his master's degree in Romance philology from the University of Lisbon faculty of letters in 1946 with a dissertation on the poet António Nobre, followed by a doctorate in 1951. Besides having a significant role in mentoring researchers and instructors, he established the university's department of General and Romance Linguistics (Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica) and was instrumental in reorganizing the Centre for Philological Studies (Centro de Estudos Filológicos), known since 1976 as the University of Lisbon Linguistics Centre (Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa).

Lindley Cintra is inextricably associated with the study and teaching of the Portuguese language, and his numerous works attest to his intellectual and scientific activity. He was the father of Portuguese film actor Luís Miguel Cintra (b. 1949).

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