Msgr Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado (8 May 1855 – 4 April 1922) (Romanised Konkani: Sebastav Rodolf Dalgad) was a Catholic priest, academic, university professor, theologian, orientalist, and linguist from Portuguese Goa.
Dalgado distinguished himself as a linguist and etymologist in the study of the influences of língua Portuguesa on a number of languages of southeast Asia. He was a corresponding member of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, elected on 27 July 1911. He also became widely renowned during his lifetime as a Konkani language scholar.
Early life
Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado was born on 8 May 1855 in the village of Assagaõ, Bardes concelho, Portuguese Goa, to a family of Goan Catholics belonging to the Bamonn (Brahman) caste. The family's pre-conversion surname was "Desai", which was replaced by the Portuguese surname "Dalgado", after their conversion to Roman Catholic Christianity.
The second son of Ambrose Dalgado, a landowner in Bardes, and Florinda Rosa de Souza, he had six brothers and one sister. Among the siblings were Daniel Gelásio Dalgado, a medical director of the health services from Savantvaddi and an eminent botanist; Patrocínio Dalgado, an ophthalmologist; and Eduardo Dalgado, a lawyer in Lisboa.
Career
After completing his elementary studies in Assagaõ, the young Dalgado completed his secondary education in Mapuça and joined the Rachol Seminary, near Margaõ, from where he was ordained a priest in 1881.
Considered the best student of his course, he was selected for further studies and then went on to Rome, where he enrolled at the Seminary of St. Apollinaris.
In Rome his doctorate was in Canon Law and Roman Law.
Return from Lisbon
After a brief stay in Lisbon in 1884, he returned to Goa as a missionary, where the then Patriarch of the East Indies, Don António Sebastião Valente, appointed him as the inspector of schools and workshops of the Padroado do Oriente and as a professor of Scripture and Canon Law at the Seminary of Rachol, where he formerly studied. He also functioned as an ecclesiastical judge in Goa.
Subsequently, he was intensely involved in religious activity in India, and then became vicar general of the island of Ceylon, particularly of the Portuguese mission in the city of Colombo, which had been abolished by Concordat of 1886.
Later, he served at Calcutta, where he founded a school for girls and a dispensary for the poor in Nagori, and Dhaka.
Close contacts with languages
All this missionary activity enabled him to forge close contacts with various language communities, thus allowing him to acquire a mastery of several Indian languages, including Mahratti, Kanarese, Bangla, Tamizh, and Sinhalese. Learning some of these languages was made easier due to his deep knowledge of Sanskrit.
Between 1893 and 1895 he was vicar-general in the coastal village of Honnavara, Kanara. There he served a parish community of Konkani and Kanarese language speakers, the latter being a language new to him that he learned during his pastoral service. While in the Portuguese outpost of Savantvaddi, with his brother Gelasius Dalgado, who was a doctor there, he learned the other dialects of the Konkani language.
When he was vicar general of Ceylon, he declined to accept the bishop's mitre that the Congregation of Propaganda Fide had offered him, probably in the context of the dispute between Portugal and the Holy See on the extent and powers of the Patronage of the East (Padroado).
During his stay in Ceylon, he wrote several sermons and homilies in the Indo-Portuguese dialect of Ceylon. His other work included The Indo-Portuguese Dialect of Ceylon, published in 1900 in Contributions of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, done in commemoration of the centenary of the European discovery of sea route to India.
Dictionaries
His first published work was the first part of Konkani–Portuguese Dictionary, written using the Devanagari script and the Roman script, and which was published in 1893 in the city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai.
In 1895 he settled in Lisbon, where he completed the publication of the Portuguese–Konkani Dictionary (which was out in 1905) and devoted himself to study the influence of English on the languages of the Indian subcontinent.
In view of its studies published, in 1907 he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit in the Curso Superior de Letras, which was founded in 1859 by D. Pedro V in Lisbon. This institution later on went on to become the nucleus of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon.